“Coming my way, madam, by any chance?” the inspector gallantly enquired.
“If you’re going to discuss the statement made by that admirable, formidable little man, certainly,” Mrs. Bradley answered. She sent her car home and got in beside the inspector.
“Lies, I suppose, ma’am?”
“Most of it, I think. One true thing was that he genuinely confuses my nephew, Carey Lestrange, with young Mr. Bassin. Carey borrowed a suit, which Bassin had been wearing when he encountered Mr. Simplon first. The premises of Saxant and Senss were burnt, of course.”
She gave the inspector a short account of the activities of herself and her nephew on the occasion of the fire at the printing press.
“Oh? So this joker was responsible for bribing the office boy to set light to the place, was he? I’ll have a word with that boy,” said the inspector. He tried to convey to Mrs. Bradley the fact that he thought she ought to have reported all this before, but she remained bland and appeared to have not the faintest suspicion that she had failed in her duty as a citizen, so, not caring to voice his opinion to a lady who had known the chief constable’s mother, he changed the subject by asking:
“And what would be his idea, do you suppose, ma’am, in setting fire to the printing works like that?”
“Unless I am much mistaken, Inspector, his object was to destroy (since he could not locate and steal it) the corrected proof of Mr. Carn’s book, The Open-Bellied Mountain.”
“Oh, so that’s where it all fits in,” said the inspector, relieved to find that the jig-saw had some meaning; although, at the moment, that meaning was particularly obscure.
“Just so. Now it seems most likely that Mr. Simplon was set upon and injured and put in the chimney simply to get him out of the way.”
“Attempted murder, ma’am?”
“I hardly think so, Inspector. Somebody clearly wanted him out of the way until The Open-Bellied Mountain was published.”
“But it isn’t published, ma’am, and here’s this hirsute little liar ready with his tall story—which we can’t altogether disprove—”
“Pardon me, Inspector. ‘Hirsute little liar.’ Thank you so much. My nephew collects such bon mots. You were saying?”
But the inspector had lost the thread, as Mrs. Bradley intended he should, and observed:
“As long as something comes in somewhere, I suppose we can say we’re on the trail. But I wish I could lay my optics on Mr. Carn.”
•3•
“The most interesting point,” Mrs. Bradley telephoned to Bassin, who was back in London, “is that Mr. Simplon-Bonner should have told so much of the truth. It indicates that he cannot be completely in league with Mr. Senss and that disposes of one theory completely.”
“Hard luck,” said Bassin sympathetically.
“Not at all. Merely a clearing of the decks for action.”
“Are you going to confront Simplon with the fact that we know his name is Bonner, and see how he reacts?”
“Well, I could do so, child, but only on the clear understanding that you remain where you are, a sleeping partner, at present, in the enterprise.”
“Mother’s little boy in person,” said Bassin, grinning into the receiver. Mrs. Bradley sensed the grin, although she could not see it, and cackled in reply.
“As for you,” Bassin continued, “I think you ought to lie low as well, once you’ve put it across Simplon.”
“I may do so, child. Good-bye.”
Her gleanings at the hospital, from which, it appeared Mr. Simplon was to be discharged on the following day, were so extraordinary, however, that she decided at the conclusion of it, to take Bassin’s advice, and so returned to the Stone House at Wandles Parva.
•4•
The case against Carn, so far, was unsatisfactory, the inspector decided, in that it depended entirely upon the death of the tramp. Here the murderer had been so abominably careless that it was possible, the inspector thought (having had some experience of barristers and their ways), that a clever defending counsel might point out to the jury that circumstances must be against the prisoner in that no man would have been guilty of the incredible folly of stabbing the tramp with the very remarkable and easily traceable dagger (“and did, indeed—we do not seek to deny it—belong to the accused”) which could have been seen, by any and all, hanging on the wall of Carn’s study.
As the death of the tramp was clearly only a preliminary to the murder of the wife, the inspector, a very cautious man, thought that the case against Carn could be made to appear much stronger, so far as the jury were concerned, if Carn were indicted for the murder of Mrs. Carn rather than of an unknown, probably undesirable vagrant.
The inspector could not help but feel that, whereas all human life may be equally sacred in the eyes of God and of the law, the average British citizen would be far more likely to be on the side of the wife than of the tramp.
With these simple yet profound reflections still in his mind, the inspector again hit the trail, and again took as his starting point the hour at which Carn presumably had left Mrs. Saxant on the day of his wife’s death.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Bradley, who, like Sherlock Holmes (her only resemblance, probably, to that great and unorthodox investigator), did not need to be on the scene of the crime in order to continue her investigations, having left Mr. Simplon somewhat hurriedly, took a small table, a garden chair, her note-book, a large scribbling block, and her sunglasses into the very pleasant, secluded lawn of her house and worked out the case all over again from the beginning.
It was psychologically very interesting, she felt, that the man who had planned, down to the smallest detail, the transformation of the tramp, his subsequent death, the murder of Mrs. Carn so that, even now, the police could not trace, with any complete and unarguable certainty, the movements of the murderer on the late afternoon and early evening of the day of the crime, should, in the last resort, have been stupid enough to use a readily identifiable stiletto for the one murder, and have left so obvious and yet so unsatisfactory a clue as his attachment to Mrs. Saxant as a motive for the other.
Her very instincts, apart from her psychological knowledge, informed her that something rang false. Even the inspector, that hard-working, yet scarcely inspired, although indubitably conscientious official, was not altogether satisfied with the case. She realised that the inspector’s qualms were not the same as her own. He wanted Carn indicted for the murder of the wife, not for the murder of the tramp. Mrs. Bradley, rolling a sheet of scribbling paper into a ball and tossing it to the kitten—not her own, but it came into her garden when it was tired of the Vicarage children—decided, with energy and determination, that she wanted Carn indicted for neither or both of the murders. The snag in the first case (the wife) was the hopelessly inadequate motive. In the second (the tramp) it was the weapon.
She compared and contrasted these snags. The trouble was that they seemed to have little connection.
Coming to a sudden decision she rang a small handbell. Célestine always insisted upon placing this at the corner of the garden table, although was not Mrs. Bradley’s habit to make use of it to summon her servants on to the lawn. If she wanted them (in Carey’s words) she went and shouted.
Célestine hurried out.
“The ’ot sun! Madame est malade! But, not an ’at!”
“Don’t babble, child,” said Mrs. Bradley amiably. “Send somebody over to the Vicarage to find out whether Mr. Wells is at liberty.”
“I bring ’im back wiz me, zat one. ’E ’as no occupations, nevaire,” observed Célestine. Mrs. Bradley gazed benignly, through sunglasses, which turned it brownish-green, at the clear sheet of scribbling paper before her, and then, as though inspired by its smooth, bland, pristine innocence, she scribbled a few words in her note-book.
The Reverend Noel Wells, having left Célestine far behind him by providing himself with a short cut, repeated the successful experiment by hurdling as neatly over Mrs. Bradley’s four-foot
hedge as he had hurdled over his own.
“You wanted me?” he said. He was a pleasant, sincere young man, and Mrs. Bradley, who had known him for years, had been responsible, in her own way, for obtaining for him the living at Wandles Parva. Her friend, the previous incumbent, a scholarly, kindly, absent-minded man named Broome, had been made a rural dean. Mrs. Bradley always valued Noel Wells’s advice and comments because he was stupid, and could never be persuaded that he was able to see through a brick wall, by the eye of faith or by any other means. His reactions, therefore, were what, for scientific purposes, could be called constant, and, as such, they were extremely valuable, especially, as she was wont to observe, to Mrs. Bradley herself, whose training had proceeded, largely, on the assumption that brick walls do not exist.
“Dear child,” she said, for she was very fond of him, “have you time to listen to a story? Not a long story—ten minutes, say, or less, if you prefer it.”
“No, honestly, don’t cut it short. This case of yours, is it? I’d love to hear about it. I presume the chap didn’t do it?”
“Now, what on earth,” said Mrs. Bradley, startled, “can you possibly mean by that?”
Noel Wells grinned.
“I do often hit the nail on the head,” he said. “The purest accident, of course. Do tell me all about everything.”
“Very well, child. But your preconceived ideas are disconcerting, and are probably prejudicial.”
“Not at all. My mind is a blank.”
Mrs. Bradley would not, for reasons of kindness, have chosen this way of expressing a known fact, but as it had been so expressed, she accepted it with a cackle of appreciation.
“A man of about forty-eight was happily married to a woman of about his own age. Later he had a love affair, of a trivial but pleasant character, with a married woman some dozen years his junior, wife of a man with whom he was on ordinarily friendly terms.
“About a year ago it occurred to the hero of this tale that it would be a good plan to get rid of his wife. She knew of the affair with the other woman. There is, however, no evidence that she made herself unduly irritating about it.
“The idea was that the husband, having killed his wife, should make it appear that he also had been murdered. It was all to look like a plot. He made friends with a tramp, bought him a cottage, and, in short, persuaded him to adopt a static instead of a nomadic existence. Then he killed him by piercing him through the ear with a long thin stiletto, which he kept in a conspicuous position in his own house.
“Later he wrote threatening letters to himself, his wife, and his servants, created something of a domestic crisis by walking hatless out of his home when lunch was within ten minutes of being served, then went out with his paramour for a drive in her car, returned in the early afternoon, and hid, whilst a young solicitor interviewed his wife on the subject of the anonymous letters. Then, when he had seen the young solicitor depart for the village, he broke a window and killed his wife by hitting her on the temple with an iron cash-box in which were the corrected proofs of a scurrilous essay he had written. This essay he proposed to publish at his own expense.
“Then he bribed a little girl, daughter of his neighbour, a farmer, to mislead the police or any other enquirers about the direction he had taken upon leaving the house with the cash-box. He was heavily bearded (instead of being only lightly bearded, as was his custom) and the girl, an intelligent, outspoken, dependable kind of child, beautifully uninhibited by moral sense or any false feeling of social responsibility, accepted the bribe, misdirected the police and others, but probably recognised the man, in spite of the disguise.
“He then drove off in a car which, except that it was not his own, has not yet been identified, and, a short time afterwards, drew attention to the fact that he had been killed by sending his ears to his lady-love at such a time that she was compelled to open the parcel in front of guests who, thereupon, and quite involuntarily, became witnesses of the fact that the ears had been received. He concluded by cutting off his hand in a guillotine worked by a young fellow who had had one or two arguments with him about the composition and personnel of the local cricket team.
“The hand and ears were really those of the tramp he had previously befriended, and whose body the police discovered in a coke-heap, in front of the entrance to the packing department of the large printing works at which the young guillotine-minder was employed. As the boy had no alibi for the business, he was arrested, but, for lack of evidence, has been released. The police have just” (she had heard from the chief constable that morning) “uncovered the whole story of the Cinderella-tramp, a warrant is out for the man’s arrest, he was last seen at a nudist colony very near his own home, and he has since disappeared.”
Having concluded this extraordinary history she sat back, folded her hands, nodded her head like a mandarin, and smiled gently.
Young Noel Wells bent and tickled the kitten, which had forgotten the ball of paper and was bored.
“Funny thing,” he said. “I mean, the tramp business would have been grand if his motive had been a good one instead of so terribly bad, of course, don’t you think?”
“You infer, child?”
“No, I don’t actually, you know, but I just meant what a grand opportunity it would be for a man with a bit of spare cash and a good heart, to experiment with the idea of finding out whether, under properly decent, comfortable and, as it were, unsupervised conditions, it’s possible to make a tramp not a tramp, so to speak. I mean, when I did slum curating, I always got a sort of impression that there were slum-ites and, virtually, non-slum-ites, if you take me. I mean, there were the people—all social reformers know them—they’re the real heart-breakers—who, no matter where you put them, or how good the conditions, would again be living like pigs inside three months. Then, one can’t help feeling—I mean, look about you at some of the council housing estates—there are people who are slum-ites from accident, not design. People who—”
“Forgive me for interrupting you, child,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I must telephone Mr. Justus Bassin, of Messrs. Bassin, Lillibud and Bassin—”
“Solicitors, I take it,” said Noel Wells intelligently. “Don’t tell me that any chance remark of mine—I must be Watson and Captain Hastings in person,” he concluded, patting himself modestly on the chest. “Oh, yes, and that reminds me—” He gazed admiringly at the retreating form of his neighbour and close friend as she walked briskly towards the house, then settled his thin body in his deckchair to await her return.
Five minutes later Célestine came out with a tray. On it reposed a coconut and a cigar.
“Madame sends her compliments, monsieur,” she remarked, “and begs monsieur to take his choice of the cadeaux. I myself believe,” she added darkly, “that madame amuses herself.”
• CHAPTER 13 •
The Moving Finger
“‘Sir,’ said she, ‘be of good heart, and tomorrow, at the dawn of day, ye shall know more.’”
Bassin knocked at the door of his father’s office.
“Mrs. Bradley has just rung up about the Carn business, sir. Mind if I run down to Wandles to see her?”
“Wandles?” said his father. “Used to know the vicar there once. Fellow named Broome. Cricketer. Well, good-bye, my boy. Mrs. Carpenter will miss you. She was coming in today to alter her will.”
His son grinned, ill-wished Mrs. Carpenter briefly and sincerely, and caught the train of the day with five minutes to spare. He reached the Stone House at teatime. Mrs. Bradley was having tea on the lawn. He liked thin bread and butter, cucumber sandwiches, and Henri’s little cakes, and made a good tea with Mrs. Bradley’s basilisk but approving eye on him. Then he said simply:
“I seem to have made a few bloomers.”
“Sins of omission, child. Very important ones, too. The worst of it is,” she added very sternly indeed, “that I can’t be sure that those you remember are all that you have committed.”
Célestine, giving the yo
ung man a pleased smile, for, as she observed to Henri, who generously concurred in the observation, she also recognised a good young man when she saw one, and this one, he was, of a verity, charming, insouciant, and brave, went in again.
“Now, child,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I must leave it to you. Begin at the beginning and recite to me all the bits that, in your experience and opinion, don’t fit.”
“Right. Well, of course, as you say—”
“No, no. The social experiments of Mr. Carn are not the beginning, child.”
“Oh, I see. Well—” He put his chin on his fist, his elbow on the table, and brooded. “Well, there was the way she—Mrs. Carn—thought it might be a woman.”
“Expound, child.”
“Can’t. She merely said that it must be somebody of his own kind—meaning somebody in the literary world, she said—who would have sent those anonymous letters. Then I began talking about this mysterious ‘he’ and she broke in and said it could just as well have been a ‘she.’ Is that any good?”
“No, child. Besides, you told me that before. But don’t be discouraged. Go on.”
“Yes, well, the next thing—oh, there was one rather odd thing. I never thought twice about it, though, because I was all on another tack, you understand.”
Mrs. Bradley nodded.
“You can moan at me, if you like,” said Bassin generously. “Now I come to think of it, it does become somewhat rummy. I went to see Senss to get that copy of the uncorrected galleys and met the other little German bloke, Simplon, at the top of the stairs. Well, I don’t really know what made me do it—it was fearfully crude—but his whole demeanour was so sort of comically Teutonic, if you know what I mean—that before I realised I was doing it, I’d said, loud and clear, after I’d greeted him: ‘Heil, Hitler.’”
“Yes, child?”
“Well, don’t they usually ‘Heil, Hitler’ back again? This bloke, singularly, didn’t. He merely replied: ‘Ach, Berggheist!’ Do the Nazis refer to Hitler as a mountain-sprite, do you know?”
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