No Winding-Sheet

9

Self-Appointed Sleuth

« ^ »

Apart from the medical and pathological evidence which came out at the inquest, there was plenty to confirm that the body was indeed that of Mr Pythias. For one thing, his empty briefcase, found beside the body, was identified by three members of the staff separately and there was enough unrotted material which was clothing the corpse for it to be recognised as part of the suit which Pythias had been wearing on what had proved to be his last day as a schoolmaster.

The Chief Constable and the Detective-Superintendent now superseded Routh in the enquiry, and the Detective-Inspector was obliged to place himself under their orders. As he had some knowledge of her household, his first assignment was to question Mrs Buxton and take her yet again through her story, including her description of the two visitors who had collected Pythias’s property.

‘Look, do you want me to have a breakdown?’ she demanded tearfully. ‘How can I help what wicked men do?’

‘You can’t, but you can help us and you must,’ said Routh, not unsympathetically. ‘Tell me once more about these astrakhan and musquash-coat people who called here for Mr Pythias’s things. They may be his murderers, you know. On the face of it, we think they were.’

At this she rallied, sniffed, dried her tears and said, ‘I’ve told you all about ’em I can, haven’t I? Come to think of it, though, my nevvy, him on the top floor, he see ’em, too, and, being an artist and them being togged up like they were, he made a sketch of ’em and give it to me. I can show it you if you like.’

‘I don’t know why you haven’t shown it to me before,’ said Routh. ‘It could be valuable corroborative evidence.’

‘What of?’

‘That these people really did call here, of course.’

‘Did you doubt my word on it, then? Oh, well, who supposes the police to be gentlemen?’

‘We can’t afford to be, love. Show me this picture of yours.’

The two of them were in her ground-floor room, the room next to that which had been rented by Pythias. She went to a table drawer and took out a rolled-up sheet of cartridge paper. The sketch was crude and looked as though it had been done hastily, but it certainly bore out Mrs Buxton’s description of the two strangers.

‘I’d like to hang on to this for a bit,’ said Routh. ‘It may help us. Identification, you know.’

‘You’re welcome,’ she said, ‘and to the letter poor Mr Pythias writ me. I don’t want them sort of unhappy memories of him now.’

Routh’s next assignment — and he was not altogether sorry to have his work laid out for him instead of having to chart a course for himself — was to trace, if he could, the clothes and golf-clubs which Mrs Buxton’s visitors had collected from the lodgings. The inference was that they must have been very quick to get rid of the things before the news broke that the body had been discovered. If he could find out who had bought them, he stood a good chance of getting a description of the vendors.

‘The chances are, though,’ said the Detective-Superintendent, ‘that the things are weighted down and are in the deepest part of the river by now. On the other hand, these people may have sold them to an old-clothes dealer almost as soon as they had collected them from the house. Pythias was a dressy man. That suit which was on the body had been made of good material, so his other clothes may well have been worth a bob or two.’

‘No hat or overcoat was found with the body, was it?’ asked Routh.

‘No. Why?’

‘Wouldn’t he have been wearing both to go out on a chilly winter evening, especially if he was going on holiday?’

‘Yes, I suppose he would.’

‘And what about a suitcase?’

‘Probably stuffed his pyjamas and a toothbrush into his briefcase with the money, if he only intended to stay away a day or two.’

‘We have only Mrs Buxton’s word that he intended to stay away at all,’ said Routh, ‘now that I come to think of it.’

‘Good Lord, you don’t think that old party murdered the man and buried him, do you?’

‘No, but she’s got a husband and a nephew who could have done both.’

‘Forget it and chase up these obvious suspects who walked off with Pythias’s clothes and golfing bag.’

In accordance with this instruction, Routh, taking the sketch of the foreigners with him, went to the only old-clothes dealer in the town.

‘Ever bought anything off this couple or one of them?’ he asked, displaying the crude picture.

‘Not me. When?’

‘Very recently, I think, but it could have been just before or soon after Christmas.’

The dealer in cast-off clothing shook his head.

‘I’d have remembered that tit-fer,’ he said, pointing to the Russian-style cap. Routh thanked him and was not at all surprised by the answer. He had never supposed that, if Pythias’s effects had been sold, the sale would have taken place so near home. His mind was still running on the town of Springdale and it was there that he received positive news that somebody had sold Pythias’s possessions.

He applied first to a dealer in second-hand clothes, watches and bric-a-brac, but all he obtained there was a piece of advice.

‘I reckon you’re trailing stolen property,’ said the dealer. ‘If you wasn’t, it wouldn’t be a police job, would it?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘Fair enough. Well, look, anything hot — or even a bit warm, come to that — wouldn’t be offered to a business like mine. I couldn’t afford to touch it, see? It isn’t on the list of stolen property. That don’t bother with old clothes, so what you want, mate, is the stalls in the Toosday market. Here today and gone tomorrow, as you might say. What’s the fancy name for stall-keepers?’

‘Itinerant vendors.’

‘Got it in one! You try of a Toosday in Broad Street. Always been a Toosday market there as long as anybody can remember. Of course it ain’t Petticoat Lane, but some surprisin’ stuff do turn up there from time to time.’

So on Tuesday Routh went again to Springdale to track down the Tuesday market. Here he had what he called will-o’-the-wisp luck. The very first stall-holder he approached did not recognise the picture of the man in the Russian cap and his woman companion, but confessed to having bought clothes, a pair of shoes, a clock, a wrist-watch, a tape-recorder and a suitcase ‘somewhen around last December’. This, thought Routh, sounded very promising, ‘Said he was a student and owed his landlady money,’ explained the stall-holder.

‘I wonder why he parted with the things? Why not have gone to a pawnbroker?’ asked Routh.

‘They’re rare birds these days. Bob may still be your uncle, in a manner of speaking, but the uncle of the old pop shop, well, he’s nearly what you might call an extinct species. Everybody’s on the never-never now, and you can’t pawn them sort of things.’

‘I suppose you haven’t still got any of the stuff I’m looking for?’

‘Gov’nor, with me it’s easy come and quick go. I ain’t got storage space, you see.’

‘None of it left?’

‘Not unless you count a folded-up docket of sorts as I found had slipped down a slit in the lining of his overcoat.’

‘Oh, an overcoat was part of the haul, was it?’

‘And a very tatty, poor-quality overcoat, too, squire, and not hardly worth what I gave him for it.’

This reply almost obliterated Routh’s hopes. He could not believe that a senior master on the top of the salary scale, with a special increment for being in charge of his special subject and with a junior master under him, would have owned a tatty, poor-quality overcoat hardly worth the money the stall-keeper had paid for it. There was also the description the vendor had given of himself as a student.

‘Can you remember exactly when you bought the things?’ asked Routh.

‘Ah, near enough. It would have been on the Tuesday before Christmas week.’

‘Not the Tuesday in Christmas week?’

‘No. I was down with flu then and never come to market at all. My old gal had to manage the stall and she had strict orders not to buy nothing from nobody without me being there.’

‘How old was the fellow who sold you the things?’

‘A matter of eighteen to twenty, a student, like I said.’

‘And you haven’t bought old clothes since then?’

‘Use your loaf, gov’nor! Course I have! Last Tuesday as ever was. But you spoke of round about Christmas time. Anyway, soon as they come in I flogged ’em. Good stuff they was and went like hot cakes.’

‘You wouldn’t know who bought them?’

‘There was three good suits and they went to three different customers. The good overcoat went to another and there was four pairs of good shoes not hardly worn at all. They went to four other customers. Know the customers? Of course I don’t. I ain’t like a shopkeeper as is there all the week and has his regulars.’

‘You mentioned a piece of paper you found in the lining of that tatty overcoat you got from the student. Can I see it?’

‘You could if I’d got it on me, but I haven’t. I can tell you what was on it, though.’

‘You said I could see it if I wanted to.’

‘Oh, so you can if you likes to go to my place and tell my old woman to take it from under the front leg of the table as it’s propping up, but I don’t reckon it would be hardly worth your while. It’s a London theayter programme and there ain’t nothing writ on it. If it hadn’t been so thick and bulky I’d never have felt it in the lining, but just have got my old woman to cobble up the slit.’

‘These things you bought recently, there wasn’t a bag of golf-clubs included, I suppose?’

‘Golf-clubs? No. Them as can afford to play golf wouldn’t sell their stuff to the likes of me.’

At the Stone House, Wandles Parva, a village on the edge of the New Forest and not many miles from the makeshift grave in which the corpse of Mr Pythias had been discovered so accidentally, Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley and her secretary, Mrs Laura Gavin, were having an after-breakfast conversation.

‘Well, the case has certain features of interest,’ said Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, ‘but I cannot see any reason why I should involve myself with it, neither have I any excuse for doing so.’

‘It’s a muddle and you’re good at sorting out muddles. It’s practically in our neighbourhood, so you could operate from here. It concerns a school, with which, as a once-trained teacher, I feel myself involved. The dead man is a Greek, and foreigners, whether one likes them or not, are always romantic and interesting. There is speculation as to whether this man was merely set upon, robbed and murdered by muggers, or whether he was some sort of undercover agent working either for or against the Greek government, in which case his death may have been an assassination for political reasons. Shall I continue?’

‘I feel you have covered the main points of interest. There is one other, however, which may be worthy of mention. The body, it seems, was buried in the school quadrangle.’

‘Looks like local knowledge of some sort.’

‘And very limited local knowledge. That is what adds to the interest. The murderer knew that the quadrangle was there and he knew that workmen had dug a hole in which to bury their rubbish. He seems to have realised the possibilities of using their labour to save his own, but he does not appear to have known that a later excavation was to be made in order to sink a pond for goldfish and water-lilies.’

‘Why don’t you write to the local paper and point all that out?’

‘You are the scribe in this establishment.’

‘Well, if I wrote to the papers, the first point I would make is that Pythias, in spite of some of the rumours which seem to have been passed around, cannot possibly have been a subversive character at odds with the Greek government, or he would certainly not have been planning and organising this educational trip to Athens.’

‘A valid argument — unless, of course, he was an undercover agent not against the Greek authorities, but for them. In such case, the holiday journey might have been seen as a means of getting him back to his own country without arousing suspicion.’

‘Yes,’ said Laura. ‘Well, I don’t think this cloak-and-dagger stuff is much in our line, do you?’

‘Neither do I think it has any place in this particular case. I think the people where Mr Pythias lodged are far more likely to know why he was murdered. I feel sure that this was a simple matter of robbery, although possibly not by his landlady or her husband. There were others living in the house.’

‘Would you remove my name from your visiting list if I got on to Gavin at the Yard and urged him to persuade the Bankshire police to co-opt you?’

‘No. I have become addicted to your society.’ Dame Beatrice looked at an unusually serious-faced Laura and added, ‘I wish you would tell me why, apart from its connection with a school, this particular case fascinates you to such an extent that you want to drag your beloved and ever-busy husband into it.’

‘To begin with, it’s right up his street. He is, after all, Assistant Commissioner for Crime up at headquarters. To go on with, I’m intrigued by the murderer’s choice of a burial ground. Surely there is plenty of wild countryside round about where a body could be buried secretly and never found? After all, until this particular body turned up — and that only for a reason which the murderer could not possibly have foreseen — it was taken for granted that the man had scarpered with the money.’

‘I think that is too sweeping a statement. As I read the accounts given in the various newspapers, it seemed to me that the headmaster who had had Pythias on his staff at a previous school as well as at this one has been convinced throughout that the man would never have made off with money which was not his own. That being so, the theory that Pythias had been murdered for the money was always a possibility and must have been in the headmaster’s mind. I am sure the police suspected it, too, but, so far, have been unable to procure the evidence they need to charge one or more of this Mrs Buxton’s lodgers.’

‘Do you know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to take a room in that boarding-house and turn that rabble of men lodgers inside out. One of them must know something and I bet I could chisel it out of him. I wouldn’t mind betting there’s one of them who doesn’t go out to work as a general rule. He’s our man.’

Dame Beatrice looked at her secretary almost with superstition. She was accustomed to what Laura called ‘hunches’ and, although Laura had never very definitely claimed that she had the Gift, as second sight is tactfully and obscurely described by Highlanders, Dame Beatrice had often had reason to believe that Laura, without being able to explain why, had displayed a knack of hitting what appeared to be hidden nails on the head and forcing them to reveal lethal points protruding from the reverse side of some rough carpentry. She mentioned this in these same metaphorical terms and added, ‘But on no account are you to take lodgings with Mrs Buxton. That must be agreed between us before you go.’

‘Aha!’ said Laura. ‘Right! The villain of the piece has been singled out and will soon be named. I suppose Mrs Buxton is a sort of female Sweeney Todd, is she?’

‘That will be for you to judge,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I doubt, though, whether she was responsible for disposing of the body.’