The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop

CHAPTER IV

Spreading the News

I

MRS GEORGE WILLOWS was getting breakfast for the children. The day was Tuesday, the time ten minutes to eight and the temperature a pleasant sixty-five degrees in the shade. Mrs Willows was a small, anxious-looking woman who hovered round the half-dozen or so lusty young Willows as a foster-mother bird might hover round a nest full of young cuckoos.

The cottage would have filled the heart of an American motion-picture producer with unadulterated joy. It was thatched, it was floored with slabs of stone, and it had a small outside porch covered with pink rambler roses. A long narrow path led up to the door; on one side of the path a stretch of garden was devoted wholly to vegetables; on the other side blazed a bed of summer flowers. The cottage boasted four rooms and an out-house, for George Willows was no farm labourer; he was a gardener. Until the afternoon of June 15th he had been Rupert Sethleigh’s gardener. Since that day he had been Major Farquar’s gardener every afternoon, and general odd-job gardener to those who could afford him in the mornings and on Saturdays. At the moment when Mrs Willows was pushing Tommy Willows out of the front gate and latching it sternly behind him, and at the same time was admonishing George Willows, junior, who was showing signs of desiring to climb a tree in his best school shorts, her husband was putting a load of gravel down on the paths of the Cottage on the Hill, half-way between the village of Wandles Parva and the neighbouring town of Bossbury.

Mrs Willows waved to Emily Willows, who, with little Cissie Willows in tow, was about to turn the corner in the lane on the way to school, and then, with a sigh of gratitude to the powers that provide schools and teachers to come to the rescue of harassed parents, she retired to the kitchen to prepare breakfast for her husband. George was supposed to have done this job yesterday, but had not been able to procure the gravel and get it delivered at the Cottage until the late afternoon, when he was engaged at the major’s and could not spare time to deal with it. Therefore he had gone off at six o’clock that morning and hoped to be home to breakfast by nine.

Mrs Willows glanced at the clock, cut the rind off four rashers of bacon, laid two eggs beside them on the blue-ringed plate and placed the frying-pan ready to hand. This done, she changed the table-cloth for a freshly ironed one, walked out to the gate again, and, shading her eyes with her hand, looked down the sandy lane in order to catch the first glimpse of George, which should afford her the signal to dart into the kitchen and start cooking his food.

Far away, and very faint in the clear delicate air of the morning, she could detect the note of the school bell indicating to the tardy that the time was five minutes to nine. Soon the bell ceased. The bees began to hum. The hazy blue of the sky deepened and the sun’s warmth became more intense. Mrs Willows sighed. George had had nothing but a piece of bread and butter and a cup of tea before going out that morning. A man ought not to shovel and roll gravel with so little as that inside him, she felt sure. She sighed again, and longed for a cup of tea. She bent, and pulled a noxious silver-weed out from among the pansies. Then she went in again and glanced at the kitchen clock. It was twenty past nine.

At a quarter to eleven Willows came home.

‘I was getting that worried and upset, I nearly came to look for ’ee,’ volunteered his wife.

Willows, an affectionate but taciturn husband, seated himself in a chair, hitched it up to the table, and, having waited in silence while his wife placed two rashers and an egg on his plate and the same on her own, grunted, and attacked his food with appetite. Mrs Willows, who had carried on a losing fight for some years on the grounds of being compelled to eat two rashers and an egg for breakfast whether she wanted them or not, sighed for the third time and picked up her knife and fork.

After ten minutes of steady mastication, Mr Willows pushed aside his empty plate and reached for the cheese. Then he looked across at his wife, who was hesitating before the second rasher.

‘Well,’ he said, with the assumed ferocity of the self-conscious, affectionately disposed working man, ‘can’t ’ee say something, like?’

‘I don’t know as I got much to say, Geordie,’ replied Mrs Willows timidly. ‘Could ’ee eat up another bit o’ bacon if I put it on your plate?’

‘Now that’ll do from you, my gal!’ responded Mr Willows, eyeing her sternly. ‘You eat un up, and no nonsense! Here I feeds ’ee, day in, day out, as very few men feeds their wimmin-folk, I’ll lay, and that’s your gratitude! Where’d ’ee be now, I wonder, if I ’adn’t see ’ee et well, eh?’

‘In – in ’eaven, Geordie, I shouldn’t wonder,’ replied Mrs Willows, desperately anxious to give the answer which would placate him by coinciding with his own opinions.

Mr Willows snorted.

‘Then you et un up,’ he replied pithily.

‘Nice goings-on in the village last Sunday night, I ’ear,’ observed Mrs Willows tentatively, when, breakfast over, her husband prepared to settle down in the doorway with a pipe.

‘You’re right, my lass. There was. Who’s bin talking wi’ you about it?’

‘Oh, young Percy Noon was passing on his way to work and stopped to say thankee for them there young shallots. Said I’d tell when ’ee came ’ome. Percy says as how Squire Sethleigh’s gone off to the States sudden-like, and young Mr Wright, up where ’ee bin working this morning, is going off’s ’ead. Give I a turn, it did, to think of ’ee working there along. Percy did say as how he went clumping young Farmer Galloway over the head wi’ a hog-pudden in the bar of the “Queen’s Head”, and as how Galloway he took and give un the biggest thrashing out, and Bill Bondy, not liking to interfere, held the watch and see fair play. And Squire’s cousin, that young Mr Redsey, Percy do say, was lying dead drunk in the middle of it all.’

‘Well, that’s the news that was round the village yesterday,’ said Mr Willows. ‘There’s more to tell this morning. Made me late for my breakfast, going off along to know the truth of it.’

‘Well, there now! If I didn’t watch and wait at the gate, wondering what had come over ’ee at all to be so late for breakfast,’ said Mrs Willows.

‘Ah! Very likely ’ee did wonder. ’Ee’ll wonder more when I do be telling ’ee all. There’s bin a murder done at the butcher’s in the market down in Bossbury.’

‘A murder? Lawk a-massy I! ’Ee’ll sleep home to-night, Geordie, won’t ’ee?’

‘Happen I will. Nothing much doing at the major’s this afternoon. The roses can do wi’ a spray, for the green fly is mortal busy up along of ’em, and I set the lad to weed the gravel yesterday, so he can go on wi’ that again. The chrysants is coming on nice, and the strawberries looks a treat. But what ails you? You don’t want for company wi’ all the little ’uns in the ’ouse wi’ you!’

‘I be mortal feared o’ that there murder, Geordie!’

Mr Willows took the pipe out of his mouth and spat with accuracy and finality.

‘There won’t be any call for ’ee to be worriting, my lass,’ he observed. ‘Nobody don’t want to murder ’ee. Happen ’ee ’en’t important enough to be murdered. What’s that clock say?’

II

‘And what I say is,’ pronounced Mrs Eulalie Blenkins to the assembled meeting of mothers in the Chapel Parlour, ‘I say it’s a judgment on Henry Binks. A man was never meant to make his living out of killing the dumb animals and offering their carcasses for sale. I’m a vegetarian myself, though I can’t persuade Robert into it, I’m sorry to say. I was converted to it when I lived in Blackwater. A good mistress she was, and not hard to please. “But there’s one thing, Sarah,” she says – not liking to call me Eulalie as it’s such a mouthful, and disliking Polly as being a sort of a skittish name, so she always called me Sarah, which is not unsuited to me, Robert’s second name being Abraham – “there’s one thing,” she says, “that I can’t abide. And that’s butcher’s meat,” she says. “We’re all vegetarians here, and Christian Science too,” she says, “and if you’ll promise to be likewise, well, I like your looks,” she says, “and I’d like to give you the place.” So vegetarian I been ever since, though I stuck out about the Christian Science on account of being a Wesleyan, and you can’t get your money from the State Insurance, you see, without a certificate from the doctor.’

An older woman leaned forward.

‘But what’s all this got to do with Henry Binks?’ she asked. ‘A very respectable man. Sober, too.’

‘He hasn’t done nothing that I know of. At least,’ amended Mrs Blenkins piously, ‘I hope it isn’t him that’s done it. It’s what he found.’ She lowered her voice to a blood-curdling whisper. ‘Human joints, my dear, all hanging up on the hooks where he generally hangs his beef and lamb on a Tuesday morning!’

There was a hushed and horrified silence, and a long pause. Then one bold spirit, running her needle in and out of the seam of a nightshirt destined to cover the nakedness of darkest Africa, enquired breathlessly:

‘Human joints? Why, whatever do you mean, Polly Blenkins?’

Mrs Eulalie Blenkins glanced around her. The minister’s wife and the rather dull book from which she was accustomed to read aloud to the assembled sisterhood of matrons had not yet put in an appearance, so Polly hitched her chair a little more closely to the questioner’s and replied softly, while the rest of the circle also hitched up their chairs and strained their ears and paused in their work to listen:

‘Yes. This morning first thing he found them. Of course, Henry Binks lives over his shop in the Purley Road, and he has also got the lease of a lock-up butcher’s shop in the market, although the lock-up still goes under the name of Smith, which was old Tom Smith as used to live over Border’s the grocer’s in Queen Street. He’s gone now, poor old man, and Henry Binks that took over the lease of the lock-up in the market has never troubled himself to have the name painted out and his own put there instead. Well, Monday not being a good day in his line of business, Henry Binks never troubles to go down and open the lock-up till Tuesday, but every Monday he just contents himself with selling a few odds and ends at the shop in the Purley Road. Well, first thing this morning, then, being Tuesday, he goes down to the market shop, leaving his wife and son to manage the Purley Road shop as usual, and what does he find?’

She paused, with true dramatic instinct.

‘I tell you what Henry Binks found,’ she said. ‘He found a body, a human body, all cut up into joints as neat as he could have done it himself, and all hung up on his hooks, as he could see when he took down the shutters. His very tools had been used to do the job and everything, so folks do say. The police is keeping them for fingerprints, my young nephew told me. An ’orrible sight it must have been! They say when Henry Binks see what it all was he fainted dead away, butcher though he is!’

III

‘Fingerprints? We took hundreds of ’em. Identify the corpse? We can’t, not yet awhile. Hold Henry Binks? On what charge? Oh, he’s under observation, all right. You needn’t worry. But there’s nothing to arrest him for. Scotland Yard? ’Ere, you clear out of this, quick, else I’ll run you in for obstruction!’

The only reporter the Bossbury Sun could afford grinned cheerfully at the harassed constable who had been left in charge of Henry Binks’s little lock-up shop in the Bossbury covered market, and walked away briskly. The usual crowd of morbid persons who immediately rush to any locality where murder has been committed were lined up in front of the shop, anxious to be at the scene of one of the more unsavoury and horrifying crimes of the decade. The constable, having got rid of the young reporter, fixed his eye on a market sign which hung about three feet above the heads of the sightseers and resumed his stand-at-ease position. He wondered what credit – if any – would accrue to him for having been first on the scene after Henry Binks the butcher had made his appalling discovery that morning.

‘Pity the murderer had the sense to take the head away with him,’ mused Constable Pearce. ‘Then we’d have known who the dead man is, and could have gone on according.’

His superiors, Superintendent Bidwell, the deputy chief constable of the county, and Inspector Grindy, who had been placed in charge of the case, were discussing the same point.

‘Damned nuisance about the head,’ said Superintendent Bidwell. ‘He’s left us everything else, including the innards. He might as well have left the head, and saved us a lot of trouble.’

The inspector guffawed heartily at what he took to be a feeble but well-intentioned jest on the part of his superior officer.

‘No, I mean it,’ said the superintendent. ‘You see, it is going to be a brute of a case. To begin with, the murdered man is obviously a gentleman. Bath every day sort of look those limbs have got, if you noticed. And the hands and feet are well kept. Then look at the cleverness of dismembering the corpse in a butcher’s shop! Nobody wonders what the chopping noise is for. It’s the butcher getting ready for the next day’s sales. Nobody is surprised to see a natty little car or what-not drive up to the market entrance and deliver stuff at any of those lock-up shops. As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose there was anybody there to wonder or not to wonder. Once inside the shop, the chap had only to shove on Henry Binks’s apron and overalls which he leaves hanging up in the shop when he goes home on Saturday night, because his wife won’t wash ’em on account of the bloodstains, which turn her up, she says, so the laundry calls for the things on Wednesdays – and there you are!’

‘Looks like a local fellow,’ said the inspector. ‘Special knowledge and all that. See what I mean?’

‘If it isn’t,’ said the superintendent decidedly, ‘– or, at least, if the dead man isn’t a local chap, I’m not going to have anything to do with the case. I’ll hand it over to the county where he belongs, or to Scotland Yard. I don’t care which it is. A murder case is always dirty work, and in a case of this kind, where you’ve got to establish identity before you can get down to anything else at all, it’s the very devil, and a confounded waste of time.’

‘Yes, the identification is going to be a tough proposition,’ said the inspector. ‘It isn’t only the head. There isn’t even a mark or a scratch on the body that you could use to prove it was anybody in particular. It’s fattish and youngish – the doctor puts it as forty years old – and it’s been well cared for. That’s as much as you can say. Well, I’d better start by finding out who is missing. Then I shall have to check them all up, and perhaps we shall get on to something.’

‘As to that,’ said the superintendent, drawing out a paper, ‘you needn’t bother about any of these. We know about ’em. All except this chap. Seems to be some sort of mystery here. He’s the big bug at Wandles Parva, you know. Sethleigh. Suddenly taken it into his head to go to America, but nobody seems to know anything about it. His aunt, a Mrs Bryce Harringay, reported on the matter by letter this morning. You’d better go and look her up. Here’s her description of him. It might fit the corpse.’