The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop

CHAPTER VII

The Tale of a Head

I

THE Bishop of Culminster sighed heavily and inspected his left leg. The leg, shapely, well gaitered, neat, and infinitely episcopal, satisfied his anxious scrutiny. He inspected his right leg.

‘I do wish, Reginald,’ said Mrs Bryce Harringay, with pardonable asperity, ‘that you would Hurry Up. The car has been at the door now for twenty minutes.’

The bishop smiled benignly upon her, but groaned in spirit. A long drive in the car with his autocratic sister-in-law was, in his opinion, a poor way of spending a lovely June day.

‘I am more than ready, my dear Constance,’ he observed, following her down the steps and out to the waiting vehicle.

Mrs Bryce Harringay snorted and, climbing in, settled herself comfortably against the upholstery of Rupert Sethleigh’s Bentley car.

‘And where is Rupert?’ enquired the bishop, as the car, handled by Rupert Sethleigh’s chauffeur, started off with some of the bishop’s gravel path rattling under the mudguards. ‘Could he not find time to accompany you?’

‘It is about Rupert that I wish to speak to you.’ Mrs Bryce Harringay paused. It was a thousand pities to miss a chance of being really dramatic. ‘Rupert,’ she announced after due consideration, ‘Rupert has disappeared.’

‘Disappeared? Rupert? But – I mean – that doesn’t sound like Rupert. It isn’t at all the sort of thing Rupert would do,’ observed the bishop mildly. ‘I can’t imagine it. People like Rupert don’t disappear. Absconding clerks and company promoters, perhaps, but not Rupert. Oh, dear, no.’

Mrs Bryce Harringay turned wrathfully upon him.

‘I am tired, Reginald, of being told absurd things about Rupert. Anyone is liable to disappear. It isn’t anything disgraceful! As a matter of fact, we thought at first that he might have gone to America.’

‘I should hardly have thought that going to America came under the heading of Disappearance, you know,’ remarked the bishop thoughtfully.

Mrs Bryce Harringay turned upon him the gaze she kept for those suspected of trying to be humorous at her expense, but the bishop’s expansive urbanity disarmed her.

‘We have had the police! We have endured the Press! The house has been ransacked! The garden-beds have been both photographed and trampled upon! This morning the lodge gates were besieged – literally besieged – by sightseers from the neighbouring towns! Rupert’s private papers have been commandeered! So has the library, which I have been compelled to place at the disposal of the authorities so that the servants and ourselves may be put through a humiliating questionnaire concerning our movements during the past few days! And it is all James’s fault! Every bit of it!’

The bishop lifted whimsical eyebrows.

‘Indeed, Reginald, it is so! I know that James is a favourite with you. I think it is a pity. It seems that James has told Various Lies’ – the bishop’s smile broke bounds at the sound of the capital letters in her voice – ‘and that Rupert never had any intention of going to America, as James had falsely led us to believe he had had, and, in fact, that he did not go, and that James was fully aware that he did not go, and that, with intent to mislead us all – deliberate intent, quite deliberate – he concocted a whole series of Untruthful Explanations in order to conceal the true whereabouts of his unfortunate cousin.’

‘And where abouts is his unfortunate cousin?’ asked the bishop, when he had digested this elaborate thesis on the subject of Rupert’s disappearance and James’s perfidy.

‘We do not know. It seems that James, in a fit of animal passion which a civilized person cannot but deplore, laid violent hands upon his cousin, and smote him on the head.’

‘I doubt whether that would have had a great deal of effect upon Rupert, you know,’ murmured the bishop thoughtfully. ‘A thick-headed –’

‘The blow,’ Mrs Bryce Harringay continued, ignoring the interruption, ‘caught Rupert under the chin and –’

‘Laid him out,’ interpolated the bishop appreciatively. ‘Go on, Constance.’

‘Really, Reginald!’ his sister-in-law remonstrated warmly. ‘One might almost imagine that you condoned, if not actually countenanced, this act of Sheer Barbarity.’

‘No, no. Oh, no,’ the bishop hastened to observe. ‘It is your pithy narrative style which evokes my admiration, not the unworthy subject of your discourse. You should have – you have a decided gift for exposition, you know. Pray proceed.’

‘Well,’ continued Mrs Bryce Harringay, somewhat mollified, ‘now comes the Really Mysterious part of the affair. The heartless and unprincipled James, for whom I find myself unable to feel anything but the most utter contempt, left his unfortunate cousin lying prone upon the damp ground at eight o’clock at night in that horrible place –’

‘I shouldn’t have thought the ground could be damp anywhere after this long spell of fine weather,’ remarked the bishop. ‘But what horrible place do you mean?’

‘I told you. In the midst of the woods near the Druids’ Stone. There is blood on the stone where the poor boy struck his head in falling. From that moment, Rupert has never more been seen.’

‘I think it is rather soon to speak with such finality,’ said the bishop. ‘I expect the truth is that Rupert is suffering from concussion and is wandering about, helpless from temporary loss of memory.’

‘Well,’ pronounced Mrs Bryce Harringay in funereal tones, ‘that is what we all hope. But such Terrible Things have been happening down in Bossbury, that really one wonders why people come to the country for peace and quietness!’

II

‘I shall bathe,’ said the bishop three hours later. They had drawn up on a piece of flat grassy land at the head of chalk cliffs. Below them the sea foamed shorewards over low black rocks, for the tide was just on the turn. Across the water the sun shone in a great breadth of glory; above the waves and up and down the face of the cliff the strong-winged seagulls wheeled and swooped and screamed.

There was a precipitous way leading down to the beach. Mrs Bryce Harringay had already refused to attempt it. The bishop, however, had been sitting on the short grass at the top of the cliffs, inhaling the splendid air and longing for a swim. The chauffeur had been sent over to the adjacent town to get himself some food, and Mrs Bryce Harringay some literature and a box of sweets.

‘I really must have a swim,’ the bishop observed, finding that his previous statement had had no effect.

Mrs Bryce Harringay looked pained.

‘So soon after lunch?’ she enquired coldly. ‘I think you are unwise.’

‘Rubbish!’ said the bishop, with an incisiveness which Mrs Bryce Harringay’s late husband would have envied. ‘I’ll make my way down to the beach and see whether there is a suitable place for undressing. Some rocks or something. If there is no suitable spot, I shall come up again and undress in the car. You don’t mind being left alone for a quarter of an hour or so, do you, while I bathe?’

‘Since I observe Cooper in the distance, I do not object in the very slightest,’ Mrs Bryce Harringay replied. ‘Particularly if he has brought the magazines I asked for and not some others of his own or the shopkeeper’s choice.’

The bishop descended the steep little path and arrived safely at the bottom. He was fortunate enough to discover a small recess, scarcely large enough to be called a cave, which formed an admirable shelter. In about three minutes he was trotting joyously into the sea.

Mrs Bryce Harringay sat contentedly reading. Cooper, on the step of the car, smoked a cigarette. In the clear shallow water the bishop splashed and grunted. Far up the beach towards the town stood a solitary red-striped tent.

The bishop enjoyed his swim. After about fifteen minutes he came trotting back up the beach, happily puffing and blowing, seized his towel, and began to rub himself vigorously.

Suddenly a voice from above cried out:

‘I say, come and look at this!’ And a young man of about twenty-five hung his face over the top of the cave and looked in.

‘Buck up and get dressed,’ he said. ‘I must show somebody what we’ve found, and there’s only you, so you’ve got to see it. Excuse me. My feet are slipping.’

And the face was withdrawn.

The bishop was in high good humour after his swim. He did buck up and get dressed. Inside ten minutes he was ready, gaiters and all.

‘Smart work,’ said an approving voice above his head. ‘I suppose they’ve invented a patent method of doing ’em up by now, like the girls’ Russian boots. I say, just come up here a minute. Right foot here – give us your hand – up-se-daisy!’

The bishop found himself on a small promontory which was occupied by a large young man in shorts and a shirt. He wore nothing else except a pair of extremely dilapidated brown suède shoes, brogue pattern, of a style which had enjoyed a short measure of popularity among men some years previously, but had since gone completely out of fashion. His face was bronzed, keen and very good-humoured. He grinned companionably at the bishop.

‘That’s my dug-out down there,’ he said, pointing to the striped tent. ‘A bit gay, isn’t it? My sister chose it. I say, look what we’ve found! Isn’t it a beauty?’

And he drew out from a hole in the face of the cliff a human skull, complete except for a deep cleft from the top of the crown to half-way down the forehead.

Twenty minutes later the bishop, rosy and smiling, climbed the precipitous little path again and rejoined his sister-in-law. Mrs Bryce Harringay glanced at her watch.

‘You’ve been a very long time, Reginald,’ she observed. ‘I do hope you will take no harm from so prolonged an immersion in the water.’

‘Oh, I was not in the sea for more than a quarter of an hour,’ replied the bishop, taking his place beside her in the car. ‘Something else delayed me.’

‘Let me spread out that damp towel,’ said Mrs Bryce Harringay. ‘It will quickly dry in this breeze.’

‘On no account!’ cried the bishop hastily. ‘I have a real treasure wrapped up in it which I intend to present to the Culminster Museum. I think I will leave it there with Brown as we pass. He can then examine it at his leisure, and I will call tomorrow and talk with him about it. I am proud of the Culminster Museum, and it is a very long time since I sent them anything. And, as I was instrumental in founding it, I feel it is my duty –’

‘What are you talking about, my dear Reginald?’ asked Mrs Bryce Harringay, frowning as Cooper took a very sharp corner at a greater pace than she considered safe.

‘I am talking about a brachycephalic skull,’ replied the bishop happily. ‘A young man on the beach gave it to me. This type of skull, as perhaps you are aware, was common among –’

‘A skull!’ cried Mrs Bryce Harringay, seizing upon what was, to her mind, the essential point of the discourse. She shuddered delicately. ‘But, Reginald! How Extraordinarily Unpleasant!’

She withdrew herself hastily from the bundle wrapped round with the bishop’s gaily striped towel.

‘Pray keep it as far from my person as the strictly limited confines of this Inadequate Vehicle will allow,’ she commanded him.

The inadequate vehicle passed over a large stone at the side of the road, and she was flung forward a little in her seat. Her hand came in contact with the loathsome protuberance she had anathematized. Mrs Bryce Harringay gave a little shriek of distaste and withdrew her hand hastily. The bishop, more careful for his treasure than for his sister-in-law’s feelings, removed the towel containing the antiquity to a safer place in the car.

‘I think Broome ought to see this before I hand it over to Brown,’ he said. ‘We could drive round that way, couldn’t we? He knows quite a lot about the Celtic era. Far more than I do, as a matter of fact.’

They reached the Vicarage at Wandles Parva just as Mary Kate Maloney was carrying in the tea.

‘Are there any more scones?’ whispered Felicity, when the visitors had been announced.

‘There will be a few more in the kitchen,’ replied Mary Kate in a sibilant tone, ‘but you’d sooner stop up the great cave of Kentucky with little apples than you would be filling the bishop’s stomach when there’s scones to his tea!’

With this dark prophecy she retired to the kitchen. The scones, however, to Felicity’s almost visible relief, proved more than equal even to the demands made upon them by the bishop.

When the meal was over, and Mary Kate, to use her own expression, had ‘made them more room to their elbows’ by clearing away the tea-things, the bishop triumphantly produced his treasure and it was reverently handed round.

‘But look here, sir,’ said the Reverend Stephen Broome, who had been in the bishop’s form when the latter was a junior master, ‘this looks too good to be true.’

‘To be sure,’ interpolated Mary Kate, who, with a dish of jam poised perilously above the bishop’s bald head, was leaning against the back of her employer’s chair and breathing heavily down the inside of his collar, ‘if a nice set of false teeth wouldn’t improve the appearance of the creature entirely! I mind when me Auntie Molly Ann Maloney that’s own sister to me father and him an orphan down in County Cork –’

The vicar looked up at her, and she subsided. Then he felt the skull all over gingerly with his fine strong hands, and gave it back to the bishop, after taking a final glance at the deep cleft.

‘Where did you say you got it?’ he asked.

‘A young fellow camping near Rams Cove found it and gave it me. Very fine, don’t you think?’

The vicar stroked his chin.

‘I should say that skull is less than a hundred years old,’ he said.

‘Rubbish, man!’ retorted the bishop spiritedly. ‘Use your eyes!’

‘I am doing so,’ returned the vicar mildly. ‘Probably the skull of somebody who tumbled down the cliffs there in our grandfathers’ time, I should say. It’s a nasty place just there, you know. And landslips are fairly frequent. I dare say if you searched about you’d find something more of the skeleton.’

The bishop looked annoyed. Mrs Bryce Harringay was slightly but, to her brother-in-law’s way of thinking, exasperatingly amused.

The pause which followed was broken by the irrepressible Mary Kate, who had no intention of allowing the Reverend Stephen to interfere with her enjoyment of ‘the company’.

‘I declare to God entirely,’ she remarked conversationally, ‘if the look of that same there is not calling into me mind the bones of the pig’s face me mother would be boiling the meat off for a dish of collared head. Just so do them lads of butchers chop the head down, the way the meat will boil nice and tender off the bones of it!’

The vicar turned his head and-glared at her. Mary Kate started precipitately, and saved the jam only by a dexterous flick of her free hand underneath the dish as the glutinous sticky compound came surging over the edge. Surreptitiously licking a somewhat grimy palm, she departed hastily in the direction of the kitchen.

‘Well, there is nothing to be gained by argument in this case,’ said the bishop. ‘But I shall certainly present it to Brown as a museum specimen of a brachycephalic skull of the late Celtic period.’

‘I hope he will accept it in the same spirit,’ said the Reverend Stephen with delicate irony. ‘I say, though,’ he broke off, ‘I know what would be rather a joke! Let’s send for young Wright and see if he can reconstruct the thing. He’s very clever at modelling. May I send over and get him to do it?’

‘With pleasure, so far as I am concerned,’ said the bishop stiffly.

‘Felicity,’ said her father, ‘send Mary Kate over to the Cottage and ask her to get Mr Wright to come over here for a few minutes.’

‘I’ll go myself. I promised to take Mrs Bradley’s dog for a run this evening, so I can call there and go on to the Cottage.’

Her father chuckled.

‘I was under the impression that you didn’t like Mrs Bradley,’ he said.

Felicity flushed and tossed her head.

‘Oh, well, when you’ve been there to lunch and been there to dinner, as we have, you can’t go on feeling unkindly disposed,’ she said.

Mrs Bradley was in.

‘But Boller doesn’t like strangers,’ she said. ‘You don’t think he’ll bite them, do you, child?’

Felicity giggled.

‘I hope not. But I’m not going up there if you won’t allow me to take the dog,’ she said. ‘I don’t like those people. There’s something funny about them. They are Londoners. What did they want to come and bury themselves alive down here for?’

‘Take the dog if you like,’ remarked Mrs Bradley. ‘May I come with you and see the fun?’

‘Then I needn’t take the dog,’ said Felicity, laughing.

‘Impudence,’ said Mrs Bradley severely, ‘is the weapon of the very young. Chastisement’ – she seized Felicity in a grip of iron and smacked her hard – ‘is the reply of the extremely old.’

She released her victim, and together they went out at the side gate into the lane which led to the Cottage on the Hill.

‘You’re horribly strong,’ said Felicity, ‘aren’t you?’

‘I am,’ replied Mrs Bradley with enormous complacence.

It was Lulu who opened the door. After a little delay, while he washed his hands and struggled into a collar, Wright joined them.

He was a short, thick-set, cheerful young man of twenty-eight, and looked more like a ploughboy than an artist. His hair was thick and dark and his eyes were bright blue with long lashes. He slid his arm familiarly through Felicity’s and grinned at Mrs Bradley like an impudent faun. Felicity, hating him because he stirred her blood in some queer, exciting, vaguely improper way – or so she felt – released her arm and talked to Mrs Bradley all the way down the hill.

‘It’s a pity she doesn’t like me,’ said Wright, when he could manage to interpolate a word. ‘I’m such a nice lad really.’

As they passed Mrs Bradley’s house, her dog came to the gate and greeted them. Maliciously, Felicity opened the gate and let him out. The Airedale sniffed suspiciously round Wright’s grey-flannelled legs, and Felicity chuckled.

‘Mind! He doesn’t like strangers!’ she said mockingly.

‘Doesn’t he?’ Wright bent down, took the dog’s muzzle between his hands, and stared into the clear brown eyes. ‘He’s afraid of them, though.’

The dog’s stump of a tail drooped. Unable to meet the quizzically smiling gaze, he turned his head piteously aside.

Wright released him, wiped his hands on the seams of his trousers, and laughed.

When he saw the skull at the Vicarage he laughed again more joyously.

‘Can I take it away with me?’ he said. ‘I’ll let you have it back to-morrow afternoon with any luck.’

‘Oh, can’t you slap a bit of clay over it now?’ asked the vicar.

‘’Fraid not. All my stuff’s up at the Cottage, you see. I’ll bring it over to-morrow, sure as sure.’

Mrs Bryce Harringay interposed.

‘I feel that it would be the best thing to do, Reginald,’ she announced. ‘I shall have time to drive you home to Culminster if we start now. Otherwise I shall not be in time to do so. Will you come?’

The bishop, looking back longingly at the skull, which was lying in the crook of Wright’s arm, followed her out to the waiting car. Wright chucked the skull affectionately under the chin, and walked home with it pressed between his elbow and his side. He carolled blithely as he went along.

True to his promise, he brought a complete head back next day. He had reconstructed in clay the features and lineaments of a man.

‘Rather a curious resemblance, don’t you think?’ he said casually to the Reverend Stephen Broome, holding out the reconstructed head.

The vicar gasped. Low forehead, fleshy jowl, straight Norman nose, and sensual lips! – it was the head of Rupert Sethleigh.