The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop

CHAPTER XVI

Mrs Bradley Takes a Hand

I

‘I WANT to hear more about that suitcase,’ said Mrs Bradley to Felicity Broome. ‘Can you spare ten minutes?’

‘I should be glad to get away from this for a little while.’ Felicity waved her arms expressively at sixteen yards of curtaining which she was cutting up and machining ready for the Vicarage windows. ‘It’s ages since we had some new curtains, and I simply had to have these. Not that we can afford them,’ she added frankly, ‘but the unspeakable Lulu scorched the last lot nearly to bits, so I simply had to get some more.’ She pushed the billows of material aside and stood up.

‘Lulu? You don’t mean – ?’

‘Lulu Hirst, otherwise Savile. Yes, I do. She took a fancy to Father and offered to do anything we liked in the way of washing and ironing. She used to work in a laundry before she became an artist’s model. She does all Father’s and the choristers’ surplices, and things like that. We daren’t trust Mary Kate with anything which really matters, so when Lulu offered to wash and iron the curtains I didn’t like to refuse. But you should have seen the state in which she brought them home! She was frightfully upset about it, of course, and offered to provide new ones, but we could not let her do that, especially as she had always done everything so beautifully and so carefully before.’

‘Well, come along,’ said Mrs Bradley briskly. ‘In here? All right. Now, first I want to know who found this suitcase.’

‘I did.’

‘Where?’

‘On our dust-heap.’

‘Do you often have occasion to visit the dust-heap?’

‘Yes. You see, Mary Kate is so frightfully wasteful that the only way I can keep her in check is to visit the dust-heap daily and make myself frightfully nasty if she has thrown away anything unnecessarily.’

‘I see. And you thought it was unnecessary to throw away a suitcase?’

‘Well, I picked it up and at once noticed Rupert Sethleigh’s initials. I knew Father had borrowed it for our holiday in May, but I was under the impression that he had returned it.’

‘Now think very carefully for a minute,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘and then tell me what gave you that impression.’

Felicity’s grey eyes, lovely in their sweet seriousness, gazed unseeingly into the blue haze of the July morning. She had seated herself on the broad step which led into the garden and her hands were clasped round her knees. Mrs Bradley, looking at her, sighed inaudibly.

After some moments, Felicity looked up at the old woman and answered slowly:

‘After we came back from Hastings, Father put it on the landing outside his bedroom door, because he knows how absent-minded and forgetful he is, and so he said that seeing it would remind him to return it. Well, now. We went to Hastings in early May – I’ve got the date somewhere. Excuse me a minute. I’ll go upstairs and find it.’

She soon returned with a small blue diary.

‘Here we are.’

She turned over the pages.

‘We went down there on May 2nd, and we came home on May 12th. Short, but quite sweet, you see. The suitcase would have been put on the landing – Now, let me see, Father did not unpack it until the Monday, when I reminded him that his collars and things must be washed. The 12th was a Wednesday, so that makes it the 17th when it was put on the landing. I last saw it –’ She screwed up her charming nose in a gallant effort to remember, but at last was compelled to shake her head. ‘I am awfully sorry,’ she confessed, ‘but I can’t remember. It couldn’t have been more than a fortnight ago, I think, that I noticed it there, but I can’t remember the actual day. I know I continually badgered Father to return it, but he kept forgetting. I would have returned it myself, except that I hated going up to the Manor House alone when Rupert Sethleigh was there. I don’t mind now.’

The Reverend Stephen Broome came in just as she finished speaking.

‘Oh, I say, Felicity,’ he began. Mrs Bradley cut him short ruthlessly.

‘Be quiet, my dear,’ she said.

The vicar stopped short, and stared at her as a man might who had been wakened suddenly from sleep.

‘And let me think,’ Mrs Bradley went on. ‘Felicity, did Lulu Hirst ever wash and iron your father’s clerical collars?’

‘Always,’ replied Felicity. ‘Why? Oh, and one is missing, by the way. I must ask her about it.’

‘Do, my dear. And now, where is my friend Mary Kate?’

Felicity went to the door and called her by name. Mary Kate entered, wiping her hands on her apron.

‘And what will you be after this time, ma’am?’ she enquired, with a deference she would have scorned to display towards weaker and meeker women than Mrs Bradley.

‘First, I will be after suggesting that you do not come into my presence and that of your mistress fingering your apron in that distressingly fidgety fashion,’ replied Mrs Bradley. ‘Secondly, I want a piece of string and a sheet – a very large sheet – of brown paper.’

‘Is it a string and brown paper you’re expecting to get the loan of in this house!’ cried Mary Kate, lifting her hands in horror. ‘Sure, Saint Michael and all his angels couldn’t be finding string and brown paper hereabouts, without they would be bringing it with them! Sure, I’m telling you, the only bit of string that was fit to hang a cat I ever saw in this house was the same that was holding up the trousers of his reverence on him, the way he wouldn’t be knowing which way to look for the buttons that were off them when the bishop and Herself came here for a wet of tea that day. And myself baking the face off me with the scones they ate and the dog over the way snatching the cold meat from under me very nose and I grasping it from his jaws before himself could be ating it entirely, bad cess to him for a slavering brute of a great rascally thief!’ cried Mary Kate, in an inspired burst of rhetoric.

‘Oh, I see. So you just pushed the laundry into the suitcase and handed the case to Lulu Hirst as it was,” said Mrs Bradley, nodding her head.

‘To Lulu Hirst indeed!’ said Mary Kate indignantly. ‘Indeed, then, and I did not! But to an impudent bit of a snubby-nosed gossoon of a boy that’s had the rough side of me tongue more than once, and will be feeling the weight of me hand if he’s after asking me again did I go on me holidays to the Isle of Man!’

The obscure but apparently lasting significance of spending one’s holiday in the Isle of Man was lost on Mrs Bradley, but the circumstantial evidence that Rupert Sethleigh’s suitcase had been handed to the boy was not. She left the Vicarage, went in search of Aubrey Harringay, sent him upon a quest, and learned that the boy had safely delivered the suitcase to Lulu. He was a bright boy. Closely questioned, he remembered the date. It was the day his father had given him fourpence to go on an outing on the following Saturday.

‘It would have been the Thursday, missus. And the Saturday would have been the Saturday before that there Bossbury murder. Yes, the day before, missus. Thank you kindly, missus. Yes, missus. Good day.’

II

Mrs Bradley, closely followed by Aubrey Harringay, climbed the apparently innumerable steps of the old Observation Tower, and at last emerged triumphantly upon the platform at the top. Slung across her shoulders was a pair of powerful field-glasses, and in her right hand she carried a roughly sketched plan of the Manor House and its grounds, including a little of the surrounding country.

‘Now, I’ve killed Sethleigh – here,’ she said to Aubrey, spreading the plan on top of a stout iron post which helped to carry the safety railing around the platform on which they stood. She pointed a yellow talon at the Stone of Sacrifice, which was indicated on the plan by a black blob. ‘Now, it is necessary to hide the body during the night. Where can I hide it?’

She glanced down at the plan and then gazed narrow-eyed at the country below.

‘Ha!’ she ejaculated at last. ‘Aubrey! What is that shed arrangement over there to the left? The hockey club’s dressing-shed? Oh, that’s interesting, I used to play hockey once.’

‘Old Jim’s good,’ said Aubrey. ‘Plays centre half. Played for Southern Counties against the Rest once. Only just missed being picked for England the year before last. Don’t suppose he’ll get hockey in Mexico.’

‘If he ever gets to Mexico,’ said Mrs Bradley dryly. ‘Hockey is a winter game, isn’t it?’ she added inconsequently.

Aubrey, who had begun to look sober at the reference to the murder, now grinned.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘A very important reason,’ returned Mrs Bradley. ‘Is the shed ever used for other purposes? I mean, does any club use it for summer games – cricket, for instance?’

‘No, I don’t think so. But I say! Old Willows will know all about it. He acts as groundsman to the hockey club during the season. There he goes by the shrubbery. Shall I hail him? You knew the mater had reinstated him, didn’t you?’

He split the air with a war-whoop which shook even Mrs Bradley’s iron nerves. Willows looked up.

‘Come up here!’ yelled Aubrey, wildly signalling in case his words should not be heard.

They could hear Willows come tramping up the stone steps.

After regaining his wind, he answered Mrs Bradley’s curt questions.

No, the hockey club’s dressing-shed was not used for any other purpose so far as he knew. He did not know whether it was kept locked. Probably not. There was no one to interfere with it. No, it was not exactly a local club. It was composed of a few gentlemen from Culminster and the old boys of Bossbury Grammar School. They played once a week, on Saturday afternoons. No, nobody ever went near the hut except during the season. It was across two fields and stuck in the middle of nowhere, you might say.

‘I think, Aubrey,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘that we ought to go and look at this hut. Will you accompany me?’ She dismissed Willows with a nod and a smile, and a promise to come and see his sweet peas.

A little-used footpath, baked hard by the summer sun, led them across the first meadow, and, after diving through a gap in a hawthorn hedge between two ancient wooden stakes, they found another path which ended at the hockey shed. It was a mere lean-to, not even locked on the outside. Aubrey pushed open the badly fitting door, and Mrs Bradley walked in. The one small window was heavily covered in cobwebs, but the wide-open door flooded the little place with light. Ominous dark stains on the boarded floor immediately attracted the eye.

‘It is for the police to determine whether these are bloodstains,’ said Mrs Bradley impersonally. ‘You’re not going to be sick, are you?’ she added anxiously.

‘No,’ said Aubrey, rather pale. ‘This is where he killed him, then.’

‘What do you mean, child?’

‘Well, he hid the body here during Sunday night, I suppose. Jolly risky, lugging a dead body across these fields, even in the half-light of ten p.m. or thereabouts. I bet he wangled him here while Sethleigh was still feeling woozy from that bash on the head. Got him here, and then did him in. Besides, the chap wouldn’t have bled like this if he was dead when the other chap lugged him in. The other chap then collected some of his victim’s blood in – in – in what? – we shall have to find out – and poured it upon the Stone of Sacrifice. You know. Devil worship stunt! That accounts for the blood on the Stone.’

‘But then,’ mused Mrs Bradley, ‘if he killed him here, and not in the Manor Woods as I first assumed he did, what on earth was that young man in such a stew about? Am I wrong? Have I picked out the right person? I can’t be wrong. Shut the door, boy, and go for the inspector. Bring him along here and make him a present of the spot where the murder was committed.’ She cackled sardonically, and then added, ‘I thought there was not enough blood on that Stone. Don’t say anything. Just go! I’m going to walk a little way – and think.’

Aubrey left her.

Mrs Bradley crossed the hockey-field and sat down in the adjoining meadow. She rested her sharp bony chin on her hands, and stared into the distance. Suddenly she began to chuckle. Then she stood up, and the sheep, looking up startled from their peaceful grazing, saw a small elderly lady, clad in rainbow-coloured jumper and check tweed skirt, sprinting gallantly across two fields back to the little wooden shed.

Aubrey and the inspector, whom he had met as though by prearrangement at the lodge gates of the Manor House, were walking towards her. She waved to them, and disappeared inside the hut. In about half a minute she reappeared with equal suddenness and walked out to meet them. The inspector grinned cheerfully at her, and winked to himself.

‘We ourselves thought there wasn’t enough blood on the Stone for the murder to have been done there,’ he observed cautiously as she came up. ‘But I wonder –’

‘The first point I want to make clear, inspector,’ interpolated Mrs Bradley, ‘is that, if the murder was committed here, and not in the woods, then James Redsey was not the murderer.’

‘How do you make that out, Mrs Bradley?’

‘The time. Mrs Bryce Harringay saw the two cousins disappearing into the Manor Woods at five minutes to eight. At about five and twenty minutes to nine, James Redsey was in the “Queen’s Head” drinking himself fuddled. That means in forty minutes he argued with his cousin, knocked him down, hid him in the bushes, gave him time to come to, inveigled him up here across that field and alongside this one, stabbed him in the throat, collected his blood in Sethleigh’s own silver tobacco-case, carried this case gingerly back to the Manor Woods, emptied it over the Stone of Sacrifice, disposed of it among the bushes, went to the “Queen’s Head” without a single visible mark of blood on his clothes or hands, and was seated there drinking hard at twenty-five minutes to nine.’

The inspector scratched his head.

‘I’d like to put that down,’ he said dubiously. ‘You’re leading me up the garden somewhere, Mrs Bradley, and I can’t just see where for the moment. There’s a catch in that explanation of yours. Just give me that idea again, if you don’t mind.’

Mrs Bradley cackled.

‘Inspector, you should go far,’ she said. ‘There is a flaw in that reconstruction. A big flaw. Tell me when you find it. But do me the justice to look for that silver tobacco-case, won’t you? Oh, and do have another good hunt for those clothes,’ she added brightly. ‘Oh, and there is poor James Redsey’s wicked accomplice to be found, who so obligingly carved up the body for James, since we can prove the boy did not perform that nasty job for himself. That accomplice, unwept and unhonoured, has been sung for by all the newspapers in the country. I really think you must find him, inspector, you know.’

The inspector grinned good-humouredly.

‘You’ve got me there, all right,’ he admitted. ‘The clothing and that accomplice would down any case against James Redsey, in the hands of a clever defending counsel. I keep on telling the superintendent so. We can’t prove that the boy cut up the body. He didn’t cut it up. And that’s where the thing hangs fire.’

III

‘The worst of amateurs who think they can teach the police their job,’ remarked Inspector Grindy sententiously to the superintendent, ‘is that they don’t even give us credit for a bit of ordinary gumption such as you would think even a baby would have. Now, look at that hockey-shed business! Interfering old busybody! And look here, sir, I got on to Wright again about that skull which disappeared from his studio, but I can’t get hold of anything. Of course, I’m not worrying overmuch. Don’t believe it has anything to do with Sethleigh. I searched the Manor House. Nothing, except notes of those people Rupert Sethleigh did not blackmail. I searched the park and the woods. Nothing again, except freshly dug earth, which turns out to be a practical joke on the part of the boy, although he denies it –’

‘Does he?’ said the chief constable who had been called into the case in a consultative capacity, and was now standing with them on the Manor House lawn. ‘Then, you know, inspector, I should almost feel inclined to believe him.’

The inspector grinned.

‘Would you, sir,’ he said noncommittally. ‘Well, never mind about that. Whoever did it, it didn’t help us. Next there was blood on the Stone. Now it seems to have occurred to this Mrs Bradley – although who gave her permission to wander over the grounds at will, I don’t know – but, anyway, she has decided there was not enough blood on that Stone to indicate that the murder was done there. Well, we had been inclined to think that from the beginning. We looked about to give ourselves other ideas. Spotted the hockey shed over Kerslake’s field. Investigated. Floor covered with blood. Quite promising! Took samples for testing. Turns out it’s a regular poachers’ rendezvous, and the blood is rabbits’ blood. Then, after days and days of picking up dead matches, and coughing like Sherlock Holmes, and finding me pairs of the vicars’ trousers that don’t mean anything, but are simply where he leaned over a newly painted fence to get a kid’s ball, this Mrs Bradley also finds the shed, and spots the blood. Sends the boy chasing off to find me, and hands me her Important Discovery’ – the inspector’s voice was harsh with emotion – ‘of the spot where the murder was committed! When, after a consultation with the super here, I tell her the truth about the bloodstains, instead of giving her the tip to keep her nose out of things which don’t concern her, what does she do?’ He glared ferociously, kicked an inoffensive buttercup out of existence, and answered his own question with a belligerent scowl. ‘Grins in my face and thanks me so much for saving her the time and trouble of testing the bloodstains for herself. Had the infernal damned cheek to tell me she herself had thought it couldn’t be Sethleigh’s blood, and got off a bright bit about – now, what was it she said? – oh, ah! – “the elimination of unnecessary, and, in fact, dangerous matter” – and, after telling me things about my inside that makes me go all hot to remember, she goes off cackling to herself as though she’d made a joke or laid an egg or something!’