Death at the Opera

chapter x: aunt

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Mrs. Bradley had wondered how best to attack the question of Calma Ferris’s death with Calma Ferris’s aunt, but found her path smoothed by the unforeseen fact that the aunt, whose name was Miss Lincallow, had heard of her fame and was prepared not only to welcome her as a distinguished guest, but to open, of her own accord and without any prompting from the black-eyed visitor, the whole subject of what she still regarded as her niece’s suicide.

“But why should she have committed suicide?” Mrs. Bradley asked. Miss Lincallow shook her head.

“Before the inquest I should have said she had fallen and couldn’t face the future,” she observed, “but since the inquest—well, what can you think? It seems she was as virtuous as you or me.”

Mrs. Bradley, who had never regarded herself as particularly virtuous in either a moral or a physical sense, nodded solemnly and assumed the sombre expression of countenance which she imagined might pass for the outward, visible sign of deep intelligence.

“Of course, one never knows,” she said. To Miss Lincallow this apparently meaningless phrase must have conveyed something at once serious and profound, for she nodded in her turn, sighed loudly—almost groaned, in fact—while her greenish eyes turned slowly ceilingwards.

“Poor Calma,” she said. “She had her suspicions of that man at once. She sat opposite him at table the first day of her holiday here, Mrs. Bradley, and at the end of the meal—lunch, I believe it was, but I’m not quite sure— she came to me and said: ‘Auntie, you must please move me away from that sinister middle-aged man.’

“ ‘What sinister middle-aged man, dear?’ I said, all middle-aged men looking alike to me as far as sinister is concerned—you know what I mean: all of them with wives they’ve got tired of—especially when they come and stay in a nice town like Bognor all alone, or any other high-class watering-place, for that matter—‘what sinister middle-aged man, dear? ’ I said.

“When she pointed him out I quite understood. A commercial, Mrs. Bradley, if ever I saw one, and you know what they’re like when they’re away from home! Worse than sailors, I always say, because, after all, sailors are subject to some sort of discipline on board ship if not actually while they are ashore, and also, of course, they do have a chaplain to read the prayers at sea and teach them to be God-fearing on the water, if nowhere else; but commercials! Why, their whole living depends on them telling more lies than anyone else can think of, doesn’t it, now?”

Mrs. Bradley, to whom this aspect of a commercial traveller’s means of livelihood had not previously presented itself, assented meekly, but, without waiting for her hearer’s comment, Miss Lincallow continued:

“And then, that night! Oh, dear! That night! Never shall I forget it! Mind you, I could hardly believe it at the time, and looking back now it all seems a dream. But, burglars or not—although, if I were on my dying oath, nothing whatever was missing from the house or in any of the visitors’ rooms or anywhere—but, burglars or not, as I say, they were in Calma’s room, both poor Calma and that man together. Nefarious, I call it, don’t you?”

Mrs. Bradley, who had never used the word in her life, again assented.

“I didn’t say a word to Calma, mind you,” Calma’s aunt continued. “It wouldn’t have done. There she was, paying almost as much for her room as anyone, and quite old enough to take care of herself, and with her father’s independent character, for all that she seemed somehow so mild. She had a strong nature, Calma had, and if she was set on doing a thing, do it she certainly would. Not headstrong, just determined in a quiet way. Behaved as though you weren’t there, if you know what I mean. You couldn’t domineer over her at all. So I said nothing, and he stayed a good while, longer than a commercial ought to, I should have thought, and I couldn’t find out what he travelled in. And then we heard why. And when we heard why, I asked my lord to leave, quick, sharp!” She sank her voice to a blood-curdling whisper. “Murder, Mrs. Bradley. But acquitted. You remember the George Bryan Cutler case last year?”

Mrs. Bradley recollected a murder trial, at the termination of which a man known as George Bryan Cutler had been found Not Guilty of drowning his wife for her insurance money. She nodded.

“Ah, I thought you would,” said Miss Lincallow. “Well, this Helm is that Cutler, and when I heard that my Miss Sooley here had given that monster the school address where Calma was teaching, I thought the least I could do was to send the poor girl a warning. That Sooley’s a fool. He happened to mention the school, and straight away she tells him that my niece is there.”

“You are referring to the telegram you sent?” said Mrs. Bradley, returning to the warning message.

“That’s right. I sent a telegram, and then I wrote a letter. Why, when you come to think of it, if the poor girl hadn’t committed suicide she might easily have been murdered by that wretch!”

“Where is Mr. Cutler now?” asked Mrs. Bradley, not attempting to cope with the implications of the last of Miss Lincallow’s remarks.

“If you ever heard such boldness, he is in this very town. At least, he’s taken one of those railway-carriage bungalows further along the beach, just out of Bognor. I keep wondering whether the Council ought to know. What do you think?”

“Do you know the name of the bungalow?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

“ ‘Clovelly,’ ” replied Miss Lincallow without hesitation. “But don’t you go anywhere near it. I shouldn’t, really. I believe he’s dangerous.”

For the only surviving relative of the unfortunate Miss Ferris, Miss Lincallow did not appear to be unduly grief-stricken, Mrs. Bradley decided. She retired to her room after lunch, and made a note of the most enlightening points which had occurred to her as a result of the interview. She dismissed as fantastic a notion that Miss Lincallow was relieved rather than otherwise at the thought that her niece was dead, but it recurred so strongly that she sought further opportunity for enlightenment.

“Tell me,” she said to Miss Sooley, who was what might be called Miss Lincallow’s junior partner in the running of the boarding-house, “what do you suppose Miss Lincallow thought when she received the news of her niece’s suicide?”

It was the kind of idiotic question which might evoke answer false or true, or it might evoke no answer at all, Mrs. Bradley reflected, as, fixing her sharp black eyes on Miss Sooley’s round, red countenance, she waited for some kind of response. Miss Sooley looked startled, twisted the black silk apron she wore into a crumpled mess, shook her head, and said that she was sure she did not know. This was a sufficiently promising beginning, from Mrs. Bradley’s point of view, to warrant further research, so, with a basilisk grin intended to be propitiatory but having the result of causing Miss Sooley to retreat two steps and gaze wildly round at the bell-push with the indescribable feeling of one who had stepped on the crocodile in mistake for a log of wood, she continued:

“You mean you weren’t there when the Headmaster’s telegram arrived?”

“Oh, yes, I was,” returned Miss Sooley, somewhat comforted by Mrs. Bradley’s dulcet tones, which issued so unexpectedly from the beaky little mouth. “It was I who held the smelling bottle ready as she went to open the nasty thing.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Bradley, managing to introduce a sympathetic inflection into the monosyllable.

“Oh, yes,” went on Miss Sooley. “And all she said was to ask me to tell the boy there would be no reply.”

“And then?” prompted Mrs. Bradley, after a pause.

“That’s all,” said Miss Sooley. “As sure as I’m standing here, that’s all she said. And her having been to see the poor girl only the evening before.”

“She went to see her on the evening of her death, do you mean?” said Mrs. Bradley, who found it difficult to assimilate this amazing piece of information. Miss Sooley nodded impressively.

“Didn’t Miss Ferris write and ask her auntie and me to come and see her act in the school concert?” she demanded. “Here, I’ll get the letter. It was sent to me, as a matter of fact, because Miss Ferris thought I could persuade her auntie to come, me being quite a theatre-goer in my young days. Come upstairs a minute.”

In the pure human joy of having something to impart, she appeared to have forgotten her nervousness, and ran upstairs, followed closely by Mrs. Bradley. For Miss Lincallow actually to have gone to see Miss Ferris act in The Mikado on the night of the murder, and then to have betrayed so little emotion upon the receipt of the Headmaster’s telegram announcing her death, was sufficiently extraordinary, but even more startling was the question which Mrs. Bradley put to herself as she ran up three flights of stairs. Had they managed to stay to see the whole of the performance and then had they made that maddening cross-country journey back to Bognor by train on the same night? The Headmaster would have sent off his telegram at about half-past nine on the morning after the murder. They had been back in Bognor to receive it. There was a certain amount of mystery in those statements which Mrs. Bradley wanted to have cleared up as soon as possible. Had Miss Lincallow not asked to see her niece after the performance?

The letter, produced from some hidden store of correspondence by the now thoroughly excited Miss Sooley, was short, but there was no mistaking the genuine desire of the writer for her aunt’s company at the school entertainment.

“Dear Aunt Sooley,” it began (“she always called me her aunt, the same as Miss Lincallow, but of course I’m no relation really,”) interpolated the recipient of the communication, peering short-sightedly over Mrs. Bradley’s shoulder at the even, legible, schoolmistress-careful script.

“I hope you and auntie are well. I am still feeling the great benefit derived from my very delightful holiday with you. Next week, on Friday evening, we are doing Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado. I enclose two tickets. You will see the time of the performance on them. I know it is a very long and tiresome journey, but I do wish you and auntie would come. I have one of the chief parts, that of ‘Katisha,’ the daughter-in-law-elect of the Mikado of Japan. It is an extremely humorous part. Do please try and persuade auntie. I could arrange with my landlady for you to stay the night at my lodgings, as it will be too late for you to get back to Bognor when the performance is over, if you would not mind a double bed just for the one night.”

It ended, “With love, Calma Ferris,” and there was a postscript: “Do come.”

“And you went?” said Mrs. Bradley. Miss Sooley nodded, glanced at the two closed doors on the landing, put one finger to her lips and then whispered:

“Miss Lincallow is resting. She’ll be in her room an hour at least. Come down to the second sitting-room.”

The second sitting-room contained a settee and two easy-chairs, all of a period sufficiently far back in history for its furniture to be obsolete, but not sufficiently removed from the present day for it to be respectable from a collector’s point of view. There was also a book-case crammed with commentaries on the New Testament, the Victorian poets in faded bindings, some light reading, but of an improving character (Sunday School prizes won by Miss Ferris between the ages of seven and thirteen, said Mrs. Bradley to herself); and the Lives of several obscure divines. In addition there were a large deal sideboard stained mahogany-colour and bearing a large, ornate, empty épergne, two pictures of rough seas at Hastings, and a depressing oleograph of a whiskered gentleman grasping the back of a chair (“Miss Ferris’s father,” thought Mrs. Bradley). A large writing-desk, a small piano, three small chairs with knobby backs and shiny leather seats, an enormous dining-table and a footstool, completed the furnishing, and made a curiously depressing ensemble.

Mrs. Bradley selected the smaller easy-chair and seated herself. Miss Sooley occupied a small chair, folded her hands in her lap, and prepared to unfold the tale.

“I didn’t have half the job persuading her I thought I should,” she began. “She said, as soon as I showed her the letter, how much she’d like to go and how Calma was coming out since she’d met Mr. Helm in the summer here. Then I said why should we not go? But she said it was too far, and too many changes on the train; and then I had a real brain-wave. I said why should we not, just for once, hire Mr. Willis’s car? He would oblige us cheaply, I said, owing to our getting him a lot of custom with the visitors in the summer, what with private hire to the station and trips round and about for those visitors that are afraid to go in motor-coaches and too proud to take the bus to places of interest in the neighbourhood—and, of course, Mrs. Bradley, Bognor is very well situated for places of interest—so that if he could not oblige us, who can?”

As the question appeared to be directed at her, Mrs. Bradley said: “Quite, quite,” in conciliatory tones, and the narrative proceeded.

“Well, we knocked him down to two pounds seventeen and sixpence, no tips, and the driver to be responsible for garaging the car at Mr. Willis’s expense, and really, you could hardly grumble at that, especially as we understood from the letter that poor Calma quite expected to pay for our lodgings herself. So at half-past ten that Friday morning we set off.”

She paused.

“Very pleased at the idea of your outing?” Mrs. Bradley suggested. The question had the desired effect. Miss Sooley’s round red face clouded and her eyes looked troubled. She shook her head.

“We weren’t on speaking terms. Very unfortunate it was. Miss Lincallow thought it would be nice to send Miss Ferris a telegram to say we were coming, and, as luck would have it, that made me say, just careless-like:

“ ‘Then she’ll have all sorts of surprises.’ Well, though perhaps it isn’t for me to say so, Miss Lincallow is a little bit nosey and suspicious. Well, you have to be if you take in visitors at a seaside resort, even a high-class one, you know, Mrs. Bradley. So she pounced on me directly for saying that, and asked me what I meant.

“ ‘I mean this,’ I said. ‘ That saucy Mr. Helm was on the promenade yesterday, and he stopped when he saw me, raised his hat, quite the gentleman, asked after you, Miss Lincallow—very correct he was—and then he turned the talk on to Miss Ferris, and really, before I realized what he was getting out of me, he was scribbling her school address on the back of an envelope he took out of his pocket, and was raising his hat and wishing me good day as cool as you please, and before I could find my breath sufficient to run after him and ask him what he wanted it for—because I could just imagine, Miss Lincallow, what you would say— he had stepped into the Chichester bus as it was starting, and off he had gone. Of course I didn’t give it him. He happened to mention the school, and I said she was there.

“My word, she was cross with me. You would scarcely credit, Mrs. Bradley, what a temper she has got when she likes! Anyhow, it all ended up with her sending the telegram to warn poor Calma against him, and when I said ought we not to let her know we were coming, she said she could not afford two telegrams, and that what could not be said for a shilling had better go unsaid, and that she wasn’t made of money, even if I was, but that she hoped she knew her duty to her niece, even if I didn’t, and then, at last, out it came. It seems she had been talking to Mr. Willis about the car, and somehow, talking of poor Calma, the conversation had got round to Mr. Helm, and Mr. Willis said surely she knew about Mr. Helm? And she said, ‘No. What?’ And he whispered it. That he was really that monster Cutler, who had drowned his wife in the bath for her insurance, and had been acquitted because there wasn’t enough evidence to hang a dog. The thing that spoilt her temper the most, though, was when she found that no way at all could she get the warning to Calma into a shilling telegram. Not that she is really mean with money, but she has her little foibles, and twopence or threepence extra on a telegram is one of them. Of course, she was a bit cross about poor Calma coming to us for her summer holiday, really. She never let on to me about it, but I guessed.

“ ‘Come here to have a holiday on the cheap! Wants the best room for the least money just because she’s my niece,’ she said to me one day. I think she thought Miss Ferris might have helped with the visitors a bit, too, but poor Calma never offered to. Still, her auntie was very nice to her face, I will say that.”

“So the fact that you went by car accounts for your having been able to return to Bognor immediately after the entertainment,” said Mrs. Bradley, who was getting far more information from Miss Sooley’s rambling discourse than she could possibly have expected.

“Well, thereby hangs a tale,” said Miss Sooley portentously. She was obviously enjoying herself to the full. “It was like this. Mr. Willis himself drove us, as Miss Lincallow wouldn’t trust herself with young Tom, and, Calma not expecting us, we had tea in the town and got Mr. Willis to drive us on to the school in nice time for the opening of the doors at seven o’clock. But the disappointment was that he lost the way, although we had been directed, and what with it being dark, and the school set in the middle of rather good-class roads, very quiet, you know, and for more than a mile and a half nobody to ask the way of, and Mr. Willis surly and Miss Lincallow what you might call annoyed to think we were paying all that for the car and not seeing the show, after all, that when we did arrive at the school gates she said she wouldn’t go in. She gave Mr. Willis her ticket, as I wouldn’t go in alone, and him and I went in nearly at the end of the first part. We hadn’t sat down hardly five minutes when down came the curtain and up went the lights, and everybody round us laughing and talking and eating sweets, and Miss Lincallow nursing her crossness out in the car, and no sign of Calma, either on the stage or off it. Well, I was ever so disappointed, but right in the very middle, just as I was having a really good laugh at that ‘Ko-Ko,’ up comes a nice little chap with a message. ‘The doorkeeper says there’s a lady outside wants you to go home now.’

“It was my lady Lincallow, of course, sick of waiting and having caught her death of cold out there at that time of the night, in December, too, and small wonder at it! Anyway, out we had to go, Mr. Willis and me, and off we drove, straight back here without seeing Calma or the opera or anything, except if it ever comes to Bognor I shall go and see it, Lincallow or no Lincallow, temper or no temper,” concluded Miss Sooley with unlooked-for spirit.

After being compelled to listen to some unimportant details relative to the drive home, Mrs. Bradley escaped to her room, and spent the time that remained before the ringing of the bell for tea in making notes. The most important points, she decided, were that Miss Lincallow had betrayed neither surprise nor agitation at the news of her niece’s death and that she had arrived at the school and had contrived to separate herself from her two companions before the interval; that was to say, before the finding of the body.

The first thing to be done was to seek out Mr. Willis and compare his version of the affair with Miss Sooley’s account. She did not want either of the boarding-house proprietors to know that she was going to question Willis, so she did not ask for his address, but went out after tea to find him. His house adjoined his garage, and his garage was, as she had suspected, at the end of the road in which Miss Lincallow resided.

Willis, a homely, pleasant man of about lfifty, scratched his head with an oily hand, smiled at the recollection of Miss Lincallow’s annoyance, informed Mrs. Bradley that she had refused to pay a penny for the hire of the car, and finally (without realizing in the slightest that Mrs. Bradley’s manipulation of the conversation had brought out the information), that he should say that he and Miss Sooley had been seated in the auditorium for a quarter of an hour at least, and probably longer, before the curtain came down upon the First Act. Mrs. Bradley then led the conversation to channels which resulted in her hiring the car for a short drive on the following morning, and she and Mr. Willis parted on terms of mutual goodwill. It was extraordinary, she reflected, how people’s ideas about the passing of time varied.

She sought out Miss Sooley again, and was able to elicit the fact that she and Willis had seated themselves in the auditorium some moments before the first entrance of ‘Katisha.’ That settled it. Although Mrs. Bradley was perfectly certain in her own mind that Miss Lincallow had done nothing whatever that night except sit in the car outside the school door, nursing a grievance against Willis, it was obvious that she could have had the opportunity to murder her niece. On the face value of the evidence offered by Willis and Miss Sooley, she had no alibi for the time the murder might have taken place, and her determination to return that night to Bognor instead of staying at Calma Ferris’s lodgings might turn out very awkwardly for her if it could be proved that she had had any motive for wishing her niece out of the way. Had she had such a motive?

Mrs. Bradley sighed. She felt convinced, in spite of herself, that Miss Lincallow had had such a motive. Everybody who was mixed up in this queer case seemed to have had a reason for disliking poor Miss Ferris. It was ridiculous!

It was also interesting. Mrs. Bradley went to bed early that night, and by the morning her brain had produced the motive, mocked itself for producing any suggestion so far-fetched, rebuked itselt for its own mockery, and, finally, compromised with itself by deciding to wait and see.

There was another task awaiting her that day. She decided that it was time to go and interview Mr. Helm. She confidently expected that he would deny ever having been at the school, and she realized that, so far, there was nothing whatever to connect him in any way with the crime. She wondered how she could introduce herself to him, and decided that audacity and mendacity would have to be the weapons of attack. After breakfast, therefore, she went for her drive in Mr. Willis’s blue saloon car and arranged with young Tom, who drove, that he should wait outside the railway carriage bungalow for half an hour.

“At the end of half an hour, child,” she observed to young Tom, “you will knock loudly upon the front door and demand admittance.”

“Seems to me, ma’am,” said young Tom, pushing his peaked cap farther back on his fair head, “you’d be better not calling on him. I haven’t heard much about him to his credit.”

“Charity begins at home,” said Mrs. Bradley, obliquely. She walked up a path of pebbles and banged on the front door. Tom, who was a chivalrous lad, opened the bonnet of the car and, under pretence of looking at the engine, covertly watched proceedings. When the front door closed behind Mrs. Bradley, he sat on the step, looked at his wrist-watch, and prepared to rush into the bungalow at the first suspicious noise that issued from it.

Mrs. Bradley’s tactics in order to gain admission to the bungalow had been simple. The door was opened by Helm himself, whom she recognized, even from a newspaper photograph, as Cutler. This was promising. She remembered the trial in which he had figured, chiefly because it had been the particularly brilliant defence conducted by her son, Ferdinand Lestrange, which had led to Cutler’s acquittal. Ferdinand had torn to shreds the case for the prosecution, and had exposed the fact that it was based on insufficient evidence. Mrs. Bradley herself had believed that the man was guilty, but the evidence against him was purely circumstantial and its strongest link was the fact that he drew his wife’s insurance money, and had himself been the person responsible for insuring her life.

The man looked inquiringly at Mrs. Bradley. She grinned in what she imagined was an ingratiating manner, and he retreated a step.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Helm,” said she. “You are Mr. Helm, of Hillmaston School?”

“Well, no, madam, I regret to say that I am not.”

“Oh, but surely,” said Mrs. Bradley, in fatuous tones. “I mean to say, they told me you were he. I want to know all about the school on behalf of my daughter-in-law, who is thinking…” She was comparing him with the description of the electrician. Was he…?

“Who told you to come to me about it?” asked Helm. “Look here; come in. We can’t talk here.”

Mrs. Bradley had gained her point. She was admitted. The railway-carriage bungalow consisted of two rooms, all the partitions except one having been knocked down. The room into which the front door opened was simply furnished with a small, narrow table, two chairs, two of the original railway compartment seats, a strip of matting in dull shades of crimson and purple, and a large portable bath made of galvanized iron. A gleam of interest in Mrs. Bradley’s bright black eyes when they discerned this last sinister object caused Helm to explain modestly that he was not fond of bathing in the open sea at that time of year, but that he considered sea-water so beneficial that it was his habit to walk down to the water’s edge at high tide with a large pail, and, by taking several journeys, to transport sufficient water from the sea to fill his copper, which he pointed out with great pride. It was a small affair, placed in the “corridor” of the carriage. When the water was warm he emptied it into the bath by means of a large enamel jug, and so had a warm sea-water bath twice a day.

“And you wouldn’t believe,” he said, smiling enthusiastically and waving his arms, “how much good it does me. But this school of yours, dear lady—I know nothing about it whatever.”

“Lie number one, if Miss Sooley is telling the truth,” thought Mrs. Bradley, delighted to find an untruthful suspect.

She drove back to Bognor thinking hard. He had denied ever having visited the school. His appearance did not altogether coincide with the description of the electrician which she had received from the caretaker. The ears were right, though. His manner did not coincide with the picture conjured up by Miss Ferris’s aunt of a bold, bad commercial traveller. In short, the man seemed a mental and physical chameleon, and Mrs. Bradley was suitably intrigued. She ate sparingly, as usual, but was so slow over the meal that Miss Lincallow inquired whether she was tired. Mrs. Bradley replied that she was not tired, but that the sea air had made her sleepy, so she retired to bed at about half-past ten, and was asleep before the clock struck eleven.

She had managed to indicate to Helm during the course of conversation that she was a wealthy widow with no particular encumbrances—which was perfectly true as far as it went—and she had made up her mind that if he were the unscrupulous adventurer which history seemed to have painted, he would not be content to allow his acquaintance with her to drop.

She was not deceived. Helm allowed the next two days to pass, and then Mrs. Bradley received a letter saying that Helm had been in touch with the principal of the school, and had secured a copy of the prospectus, which he would be pleased to talk over with her if she would be kind enough to take tea with him any afternoon that suited her. Mrs. Bradley went that very afternoon, and found him, very spruce, awaiting her.

“I had a feeling that you might come to-day, dear lady,” he said. The sparse sandy hair was parted in the middle and carefully brushed. The grey suit was neat and smartly cut. Knife-edged creases down the trousers and a tie-pin of extraordinary brilliance completed his outward appearance, and the whole effect compelled Mrs. Bradley to smile like an alligator which sees its evening meal within measurable distance of its jaws.