MRS. BRADLEY was the perfect guest. Even relatives-in-law, those touchy, difficult, and chary hosts, continually requested her to stay, were disappointed when she refused, and frolicked about her like puppies unleashed when she spared them a week in the summer. This similitude might hardly apply to the stately gambols of Lady Selina Lestrange, who weighed fifteen stone, and seldom moved far save under haulage; but the moral effect of Mrs. Bradley’s visits may be thus, not inadequately, represented. The lure on the present occasion had been horticultural and psychological.
“Really, Adela dear, I want to consult you about Sally. She seems to be growing quite morbid, won’t go about, meets a most impossible person secretly, and has been getting, I find, all sorts of dreadful medical books from the London Library. I wrote to them and stopped it, of course. She is behaving very badly to that nice Dick Paradine, you knew his father, and of course I have no influence, but I believe the child really respects your opinion. Our borders are exquisite, it seems hard to realize that with all this taxation we may have to cut down the outdoors staff, and next year it will be a wilderness. So do come—”
Thus Lady Selina, at her none too extensive wits’ end; to which Mrs. Bradley crisply replied:
“I should like to see your garden, and will come, if I may, next Monday. Sally, I imagine, needs something to do rather than someone to marry.”
The result of this interchange was Mrs. Bradley’s arrival in time to drink tea under an immemorial elm on the Lestrange’s lawn, and, with a bright, black eye alert for wasps, to listen to her sister-in-law’s moan.
“—and she won’t be civil, except to this awful young man, and she huddles herself up all day in her room. It’s morbid, and if there’s anything I dread—it’s bad enough having Ferdinand always in the papers.”
“To say nothing of me,” supplemented Mrs. Bradley with a gleam.
“Darling, I know you never actually seek notoriety. But I mean, all this obsession with crime! I do think Ferdinand might sometimes find someone respectable to defend.”
That famous criminal lawyer’s mother gave a loud cackle of laughter that set off Lady Selina’s parrot, who had been brought out for an airing in the June sun.
“Ha, ha, ha,” observed the parrot shrilly. “Give us a kiss, give us a drop o’ beer. Smack!”
To this Mrs. Bradley’s cackle played second, and the duet brought a figure to one of the second floor windows of the distant house. Mrs. Bradley’s sharp eyes noted it at once; noted, too, an odd appearance about the mouth, as of a thin dark moustache. “Pencil,” proclaimed her thoughts, while her remarkable voice responded in the negative to her hostess’s question concerning more tea.
“Delicious, but no more. Your garden’s divine. I simply ‘must walk about.”
“Shall I come with you?” Lady Selina’s fond gaze was on the strawberries, of which she had already consumed two platefuls.
“Stay where you are,” commanded Mrs. Bradley. “Goodness, I’ve known you more than seven years.”
“I thought that was poking fires.”
“Gardens too,” responded Mrs. Bradley firmly, who detested a personally-conducted tour as intensely as she favoured a solitary stroll. Her objection was sustained by the parrot, who exclaimed with hospitable heartiness:
“Give ’er air, give us a drop o’ beer, hullo, hullo, she’s my sweetie!”
Mrs. Bradley thus encouraged set off on her tour, keeping well within the field of vision of the second floor window, slowly ranging, surveying flowers with almost professional deliberation. She had worked round to that side of the garden where rhododendrons, past their prime but still heavy with bloom, made an impermeable screen, when she heard the expected voice.
“What are you doing, Aunt Adela, snooping about?”
“I am snooping, Sally, if that nondescript word means exploring, your mother’s garden.” She eyed swiftly, piercingly, the slim young figure before her. “And what about you?”
“Mummy’s asked you to talk to me, hasn’t she?” asked Sally with no preliminary sparring.
“She did,” admitted Mrs. Bradley, unconcerned, “but I shan’t need to.”
“Oh!” Sally was momentarily dashed.
“When,” pursued Mrs. Bradley, “I hear of a girl who shuts herself up in her room, and gets in medical books, and snubs her admirer, I don’t jump to the concluson that she’s going to murder him. I assume at once that she is writing a detective novel.”
Sarah stared a moment, and gave vent to an expletive which wrinkled Mrs. Bradley’s eyes with distaste.
“Blast! And I didn’t want Mummy to know!”
“So you shut yourself up, and don’t go out, and won’t be civil, and generally behave in a way calculated to drive her to frenzy.”
“Don’t go out! Where is there to go? You don’t know how dull it is here.”
“Dull, with his lordship of Common-Stock at your back door?”
“He’s an old toad. He’s vile to everybody. Teddy Mills told me—”
She halted. “Oh, well, I don’t suppose it matters. Teddy’s leaving the old brute, anyway. But he said sometimes he feels like strangling him. He uses money like a bludgeon, and publicity like poison-gas.”
“A quotation from your book, I presume,” said Mrs. Bradley, “or from Mr. Edward Mills?”
“As a matter of fact,” Sally answered, with an innocent air, “I thought it would be rather fun to make my murderer someone like Lord Comstock.”
“Never embark on a jargon you don’t know. Landed gentry are more in your line, and journalese is one of the more difficult languages.”
“Oh, Teddy helps with that.”
“H’m!” Mrs. Bradley cleared her throat with emphasis, and lifted one yellowish claw covered with admirable but equally yellowish diamonds. “Edward is forbidden fruit; Edward takes your fancy. Edward’s employer is unsympathetic. Your mother also is unsympathetic. Don’t interrupt me. Comstock keeps Edward’s nose to the grindstone and makes his life a burden generally. It is difficult for you to meet Edward often; whose fault? The employer’s, naturally. You therefore start a novel, in which you avenge yourself on the employer by proxy, and with impunity. The name for this process is wish-fulfilment. Two centuries back people stuck pins into wax figures with the same idea.”
Sally, who had begun by looking angry, now had subsided to something like reluctant awe.
“I say, Aunt Adela, that’s most awfully good. Grand sleuthing—”
“Is it correct?”
“Pretty well. I mean, Teddy’s fearfully good-looking, and good at things, and that old animal won’t ever let him off the chain. And then Mummy’s always ramming Dickie-Paradine down my throat.”
“Do you want me to speak to your mother about it?”
“Oh no, please,” said the girl in a great hurry. “You see, there wouldn’t be much money, and of course he’s frightfully young and so am I really, if you come to think of it.”
Mrs. Bradley came to think of Sally’s seventeen years, and found them surprising in combination with this very reasonable attitude.
“The question of marriage hasn’t arisen, then?”
“No. Why should it? Why should one start off being all stuffy? Marriage is like cold cocoa, nourishing but nauseous.”
Mrs. Bradley surrounded this last remark with quotation marks, labelled it “Edward Mills, Esq.,” and passed on.
“I think I shall have to meet this young man.”
“Mummy won’t have him here. Mummy’s maddeningly county, sometimes. I mean, Teddy’s meeting Cabinet Ministers and people like that all day. He’s bound to get on.”
“I see. Ambitious?”
“Oh yes, fearfully.”
“Yet he is leaving this employment where he meets such daily stepping-stones to ambition?”
The girl flushed.
“Teddys awfully sensitive. Why should he stay and be treated like a pickpocket? Aunt Adela, swear you won’t say a word to Mummy about all this?”
“I’m your mother’s friend, you know,” Mrs. Bradley reminded her.
“Yes, but you didn’t play fair. I mean, you got it out of me—I mean, it’s Teddy’s secret as well as mine. And after all”—a touch, could it be of relief?—“he’ll be going away soon.”
“We’ll see,” said Mrs. Bradley. Then, briskly, “Let me help you with the book, at any rate. How far have you got?”
“Only the first two chapters.”
“Body on the floor, I suppose, in the study?”
“Yes. Shot. Lots of blood,” Sally responded with relish.
“Off with his head! So much for Comstock,” proclaimed Mrs. Bradley grandly, her amazing voice lighting up even so uninspired, so very blank a verse, into poetry. Another voice, an excited and bubbling voice, but one that knew its place, said at her shoulder:
“For you, madam. A note. Gentleman’s waiting.”
Mrs. Bradley was too much of her generation to give any outward sign of irritation or dismay. She did say, however, plaintively:
“Now, who can have found me here? “as she opened the envelope. The note was long; it covered two sheets, and when she had read it she paused a moment, weighing it in her hand with pursed lips, thinking. At last she asked of the waiting butler an unexpected question.
“What’s the time?”
It was six; five o’clock by what the agricultural neighbourhood called God’s time, and completely light. Her next question was to Sarah.
“Dear child, do you think your mother’s ban on young men would extend to an Assistant Commissioner of Police?”
And she handed the note, which Sarah conned.
“Heard in the village you’d just arrived. Look here, may I see you? Sorry, but it’s something really urgent, and I’ve got to get back to London at once. Please. A. L.”
“Now what,” pondered Mrs. Bradley, “can Alan Littleton’s really urgent trouble be?”
It was a rhetorical question, one, that is, which anticipates no answer; but answered it was, and from an unexpected source.
“Pardon me, madam,” said the voice of the salver-bearer, tremulous with that sweetest, supremest human joy, the joy of being first with the news. “Can the gentleman be referring to the murder of Lord Comstock?” And, while they gaped: “Found in his study, miss. Shot through the ’ead. (Just ‘ad the news from the grocer’s boy, madam.) Shot right through the ’ead; blood”—the gleam in the salver-bearer’s eye betrayed him an amateur of crime—” blood everywhere.”
The situation was more than usually unfair to Lady Selina. Seated in a pleasant torpor, comfortably involved in a patent garden chair from which no unaided exit was possible, her contented gaze resting upon an empty cream-jug, she was suddenly assailed by her daughter, breaking the news that an Assistant Commissioner of Police was on the premises, and that her neighbour, whom she ignored while detesting, had been murdered during the day. At first her reaction to the double news was slow; the effect of the latter part, not unpleasant, being cancelled out by the former statement, which seemed to have more than a savour of the dreaded morbidity. But that savour, like a clove of garlic artfully used in cookery, rose gradually to appal and permeate her whole mind. That the neighbour should meet a thoroughly deserved end was nothing much; that her roof should harbour policemen was serious and unsettling, and a matter that must at once be dealt with in person.
Her first recorded utterance was: “Bother Adela!”
Her second: “Well, I suppose—but I cannot and will not have him to sleep!”
Her daughter, wrought to politeness and tact by this new excitement, reassured her.
“He only wants to talk with Aunt Adela. And he says he’s probably not a policeman any more.”
“Then why does he come here?”
“Aunt Adela, Mummy, I told you. He’s come about the murder. It’s frightfully important. Oh, Mummy, don’t go all Cadogan!”
Thus Sally who, with tact, but at a great expenditure of self-restraint, kept apart herself, and fended off her indignant mother from the concentrated talk which was proceeding in the breakfast-room, and whose progress, through the windows, she could witness; an impressive sight. Aunt Adela, shockingly and expensively dressed in her orange satin coat and skirt, sat bolt upright like a Buddha, only her quick black eyes moving. A dark lean man with a moustache gesticulated, standing. As she watched she saw him sketch a gesture, a very characteristic gesture, a sudden tugging at the lobe of the left ear by the right hand. He laughed as he did it. Sally did not laugh. For that was the way Teddy pulled his ear, and the very thought of Teddy, so sensitive, involved in this mess, turned her for a moment still as stone. When Alan Littleton came out to his car she was waiting by it.
“I meant to ask you—do you think I could have a word with Mr. Mills?”
Littleton looked at her.
“He’s at Winborough.”
“Winborough? Why?”
“He’s been—” he softened it—” asked to make a statement, I believe. But I can’t give you any exact information. I’m here as a private individual, you know. Must be off up to London again at once.”
“But what can Teddy know about it?”
“The police have to question everyone. It doesn’t mean they think he’s done it. I’m sorry, I must be off now.”
She watched the neat blue car with the recent dent in its mudguard disappear, spurting gravel as it went, and admired the Commissioner’s handling, for the drive was tricky. As an individual, however, she had less admiration for Major Alan Littleton. He had been abrupt with her. He had mimicked Teddy and laughed. He had a dark lean kind of good looks for which the rather ambrosial head and well-covered person of the late Lord Comstock’s secretary had given her a distaste. She wandered back into the hall, pondering. “Asked to make a statement.” What did that mean? Encountering Aunt Adela she referred the question to her.
“Probably,” responded that lady, “that they’re holding him on some sort of suspicion.” The girl flinched. “My dear child, what else could you expect of local police? Or Cabinet Ministers either; imbecility unfortunately isn’t confined to one class. They’ve suspended Alan, for instance, just because he happened to be there. And they’re asking all the wrong questions, of all the wrong people. This isn’t a crime that can be solved by measuring burnt matches and watching the clock. It isn’t a premeditated crime at all. Therefore”—Mrs. Bradley suddenly knuckled her niece jocosely in the ribs—” therefore it wasn’t Teddy, so try and look a little more cheerful.”
“Of course it wasn’t Teddy,” said the girl resentfully; and then, instinct demanding a backing of reason; “Why wasn’t it?”
“Girl! And you aspire to write stories about this sort of thing! A house full of respectable, right honourable and right reverend people, to say nothing of others we know nothing about as yet, but who may be presumed to come within one or other of those categories; the cook, the gardener, the unknown lady in Sir Charles’ car—you haven’t heard about that, of course; a house where policemen go casually bicycling by; a house swarming with visitors. And the confidential secretary, with all the twenty-four hours of the day to do his murder, chooses just that one, with eminent men popping in and out like cuckoos from clocks. Nonsense! The whole thing was a psychological explosion; the pistol, so to speak, was merely a symbol, merely the physical expression of a mental state. Whose? Well, we shall have to ask a few questions ourselves.”
Mrs. Bradley began inquiries that night at dinner. It was easy enough, for despite Lady Selina’s anguished glances, and steady leading of the conversation to the Women’s Institute performance of Box and Cox, impending three weeks hence, her guests could not be induced to talk of anything but Lord Comstock’s death. He had never been invited to her table in life—not that he would have come, though he knew to a sixpence the news value of a marquess’s daughter; his notions of entertainment were quite other. Now, by reason of a small blue hole in his temple, he took possession of her mahogany, and lorded it over the excellent food, the candles, the tranquil roses. But this disregard of the hostess’s wishes was understandable considering that one of the guests was none other than Canon Prichard, the Vicar of Winborough, he whose car had been aspersed by the Assistant Commissioner as that which fled so guiltily down Lord Comstock’s drive.
“When the police inquired of me by telephone,” said the Canon, to an attentive audience, “naturally I assured them that the car had never left the garage. I was in London all day—a most difficult session; Bishops’ ideas nowadays are startingly modern in some matters. I walked to the station. I walked back from the station this evening. But when I went at seven-thirty into the garage, unlocking the door as usual—”
(“A padlock, Canon?” from Mrs. Bradley.
“Quite an ordinary padlock, yes.) I went in, I inspected the car, which looked much as usual. I did not examine the speedometer. But—and this is a very curious coincidence; quite providential, if one may use that word with reverence in connection with machinery. Just at the entrance to your drive, Lady Selina, by the lodge, my car coughed, and spluttered, and finally ceased to move.”
Exclamations from the rapt throng.
“You will guess, probably sooner than I did, the true cause. I examined the tank by the aid of a handy little pocket rule which I make it a practice to keep among my tools. Empty! The tank, which to my knowledge had held a gallon when I returned last night from a visit to Meauchamp, was empty.”
This was sufficiently exciting and suspicious; the entire table buzzed with conjecture. Mrs. Bradley, however, in royal blue and looking oddly like a travestied lizard, would attempt no guesses and volunteer no statements. She was most unsatisfactory, and the vicar had a reproachful eye for her, as for a parishioner spied drowsing in sermon-time. But at the duckling stage of the meal she leapt into public favour again.
“Beg pardon, madam,” said the tremulous voice of that gratified crime-fancier, the butler, “Sir Ferdinand Lestrange on the ’phone.”
Mrs. Bradley left the table to its buzzing, and sought the telephone in the hall.
“Well, Ferdinand?”
“Look here, mother. Do you want to take a hand in this Comstock business?”
“Dear child, I’m human, I hope.”
“I’ve been talking to the Commissioner. He’s going to give facilities to a chosen few—”
“Not newspapers?”
“No, no; amateurs; Wimsey among others. I thought as you were down there already—”
“Of course. I’m greatly obliged to you, Ferdinand. Especially as, from what I hear, the police are going about the whole business in an entirely idiotic way. Suspending Alan Littleton, for instance.”
“He was there, you know. With a similar weapon. They could hardly do anything else.”
“Where are the two revolvers now?”
“The local fellows are holding them, I believe. No finger-prints on either. On the one he was killed with, none at all.”
“The one he was killed with? Dearest child, aren’t you assuming a good deal?”
“The one found by the body; I apologize. The bullet has been extracted. By the way, one bullet only had been fired.”
“Thank you, dear. I like my news crisp. Now, there are some people I would very much like to talk to. I’ve spoken with Alan; but there are these two unfortunates who are being detained—”
“I’ll get the Commissioner’s office to telephone permission. Have you seen Comstock’s Clarion this evening? Black borders an inch thick, and a suggestion in the leader that he should be buried in the Abbey.”
“I think that honour should be reserved for his murderer. Very much obliged, dear boy. Good-night.”
In the morning there was a pitched battle with Lady Selina.
“Adela, I will not have it. You are quite old enough—”
“Sixty-four, dear.” A macaw-like screech.
“—to judge for yourself, but I will not have my daughter mixing herself up in police-courts.”
“Daddy was on the bench. He always said you saw simply masses of human nature like that. Why shouldn’t I go in with Aunt Adela?”
“I will not have you cheapening yourself by running after a young man whom I have always refused to have in the house, I’m thankful to say. Of course, you’ll take no notice of me—”
“He’s absolutely innocent, and I don’t know what you call Christianity, letting people down when they need help most.”
“Don’t be irreverent, Sally. You must go out of the room if you can’t speak properly. It is your aunt’s fault for encouraging you. No, Adela, I will not listen, and much as I enjoy having you here, you know that I cannot have you encouraging Sally to be disobedient and wilful.”
In short, Lady Selina was roused to the point, which occurred about once in five years, of putting her large and sensibly shod foot firmly down. Nothing could be done. Mrs. Bradley could do no less than withdraw her support from Sally, who unquestionably had displayed bad manners; and a quarter-hour later set off in a car, leaving the protagonists to simmer down. With a sigh for the tactlessness of parents she saw, as she stepped into her vehicle, the younger combatant, in an old leaf-coloured skirt, slipping away in the direction of Comstock’s house, and hoped, but without much confidence, that the child would keep out of mischief.
They held Assizes in Winborough, which was the county town, and there was accommodation in its gaol for every degree of prisoner. Her name and permit had preceded her; and at eleven o’clock she found herself at last in the presence of Mr. Edward Kimberly Mills.
He was shaven and kempt, and less offensive than Mrs. Bradley had feared; but he had already been a good deal questioned, and his manner with her was at first a trifle restive. But the third sentence broke it down.
“I don’t usually deliver this sort of message, Mr. Mills; but my niece, Sally Lestrange, sends her love.”
He steadied at that.
“Does she? Has she told you—?”
“Not a great deal,” said Mrs. Bradley, who, having paid her tribute to sentiment, was not prepared to let Mr. Mills drivel. “Now, you know, I’m only here to help. I dare say you’ve been so much questioned that you’ve got your story quite fixed in your mind by this time, but I want you to be flexible. Let us try a few relaxing exercises. For instance, what was the late Lord Comstock’s manner to dependants?” Mr. Mills stared, smoothed his too-curly hair with a somewhat podgy hand, and replied:
“Rude, mostly.”
“Ah! Familiar, ever?”
“Sometimes. But look here, I mean, don’t get the idea it was Farrant shot him, you know.”
“Farrant? That’s your fellow – detainee? No, I didn’t suppose it. Did Lord Comstock ever have periods of intense depression?”
“Funny you should ask that,” returned Mr. Mills, with a touch of awe. “He was always up and down. Cursing the soul out of somebody, or else sitting tight with a face screwed up like a fried sole.”
“Or a lost one,” said Mrs. Bradley softly.
“Which? Oh yes, I see. Bright of you spotting that. He was a bit of a genius, of course; you expect ups and downs. But,” said the young man again, with a gleam of alarm, “he didn’t shoot himself, you know. I mean, he may have been depressed, but I’d take my oath he didn’t do it.”
“No,” dubiously Mrs. Bradley agreed, “possibly not while he could get himself noticed in any other way. These inferiority complexes always prefer to make other people suffer.”
“Inferiority? But he was—”
“A blusterer; I know. You’ve misapprehended the term as people do. Men conscious of inferiority are always trying to impose themselves on others, because they know that underneath they are cowards or cretins. Very occasionally they see themselves as they are; then they go down in the dumps. I don’t want to put the police type of question, but you must excuse just one. Is it true that you were under notice to leave Lord Comstock’s service?”
Mr. Mills shot her a look; but the lizard’s face was smiling in kind wrinkles, and the beautiful voice was persuasive.
“Well, as a matter of fact—but absolutely wrongly. I mean he’d got absolutely the wrong idea.”
“What was the right idea?”
“He thought I couldn’t hold my tongue.”
“But you can, of course.”
“Of course. Only what I mean is, you’ve got to make it worth a fellow’s while. I’d had one or two offers to sell information, you see; nibbles. I turned them down, of course. But I told Comstock I’d had them, and I—well, I sort of suggested that I could have found a use for the money. Just a hint, you see. After all, there was the future to think of. Only instead of giving me a rise, he told me to get out,” said the injured young man. “that was two days ago. Just the sort of thing he was always doing himself, too; only he gets—got—away with it.”
“I see.” Mrs. Bradley pondered, and looked at him with unblinking lizard’s eyes.
“Do you know, Mr. Mills, if you’ll allow an old woman to comment, I don’t think you’re cut out for a career of piracy. It takes a good deal of strong, sterling, bumptiousness and a thick skin to succeed as a blackmailer.”
“Look here,” said the young man desperately, “I’ve had quite enough bullyragging. As much as I can stand. You’re Sally’s aunt and all that, but—”
“Sally’s aunt,” repeated Mrs. Bradley gently. “You haven’t actually taken any money, have you, Mr. Mills? From the nibblers, I mean?”
Mr. Mills, his eyes intent and frightened, faced her and made no answer.
“Because if you had,” went on Mrs. Bradley, as if musing, “of course that clears you from any suspicion of murder.”
“Clears me?” echoed the young man, and rather painfully cleared his own throat.
“Of course. Comstock was the goose that laid the golden eggs; he contrived the plans and—stunts, isn’t that the hideous word?—that the nibblers paid you for. It was to your direct advantage to keep Comstock alive, and planning, and the nibblers well informed. Of course you’ll say “—Mr. Mills’ mouth was opening, fish-like—“that he had already found out and dismissed you. But I imagine that, even so, you would not have lacked for information. There are always impressionable typists, and you with your remarkably good looks—you mustn’t really mind an old woman.” Mr. Mills, crimsoning once more, flinched as she dug him in the ribs with two bony fingers. “So, you see, it might be as well to own up.”
Mr. Edward Mills hesitated, gulped, and came out suddenly with a request.
“I say, please, you won’t tell Sally, will you? The typist, I mean. I can’t think how you got hold of it, there’s absolutely nothing in it, only this girl—well,” said Mr. Mills relinquishing all hope of an explanation in words, and relying on Mrs. Bradley’s intuition, “you see how it is.” He smoothed his too-curly hair, with just the hint of a lady-killing smile.
“I do,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I see how quite a number of things are. You belong psychologically to a very large class; I won’t bother you with the technical name. But they all copy their neighbours, and do in Rome as Rome does, and in the right environment they can remain perfectly honest on a thousand a year.”
She moved, with a gesture of farewell, to the door.
“But look here,” said Mr. Mills, following, “I haven’t admitted anything. I’m not going to admit anything—”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Bradley, with superb impatience, “my dear good ostrich of a young man, good-bye!”
The two revolvers were indeed in Superintendent Easton’s charge, and obedient to the wires pulled miles away by Sir Ferdinand Lestrange they were produced, with something of a tolerant and condescending smile.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Bradley, peering down at the pair through lorgnettes, “American make, I see;?15, or thereabouts.”
“Correct, ma’am,” agreed the Superintendent, a trifle surprised at this show of technical knowledge. “No finger-prints on either.”
“No,” said Mrs. Bradley, “naturally. The butt’s rough. And as for the trigger, one doesn’t pull with the tip, whichever finger one uses. Personally, with a?38—but that’s a good deal larger—I find I have more complete control pulling with the middle finger, and steadying with the fore. However. Which was the revolver from which the shot was fired?”
The Superintendent scanned both butts, and handed her the one to which a small red label was attached.
“That’s the weapon. Fully loaded in all chambers, one shell fired, finger-prints wiped dean, and barrel.” Mrs. Bradley almost jumped. “Yes, ma’am. Barrel clean as a whistle.”
“When’s the post-mortem?” Mrs. Bradley asked, paying no attention. “And where’s the bullet?”
“Doctor’s in there now.” The Superintendent indicated the direction of the mortuary with a jerk of his head. “Well, talk of angels, as they say.”
For a neat grey gentleman had appeared in the doorway, smelling not disagreeably of disinfectant.
“That’s over, Superintendent! “he announced after one single curious but gentlemanly glance at Mrs. Bradley, who, dressed as she was in peacock green, seemed the last person to be expected in a police-station.
“This is the bullet, ma’am,” said the Superintendent cheerfully, producing a small wooden box from his pocket. “And Dr. Raglan might have heard us talking about him. Of course,” he opened the sliding lid and eyed the greyish fragment, “this won’t tell us much till they get the microscope to it.”
It was a small bullet. The nose had mushroomed; but there was enough lead left, the stalk, as it were, of the mushroom, in its original shape, to display the characteristics by which each barrel sets its own stamp upon every bullet fired from it.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley slowly, “I suppose we must wait for the microscope. Who wields it? You, Dr. Raglan?” Her smile drew him into the, conversation.
“I’m not an expert, I’m afraid. It’s a very expert job, you know. Vital to be accurate.”
“Browne and Kennedy; yes, I realize that.” She picked up the other revolver, broke it, and was squinting down the barrel and the chambers in turn. “And this is the weapon Major Littleton was carrying. Yes. You’ll fire test bullets from both, of course; and then compare the markings with this.” She indicated the grey fragment.
“That’s the ticket,” said the Superintendent jovially. “Then we shall know for certain which gun it came out of.”
“But not who fired the gun,” said Mrs. Bradley very gently. “Well, gentlemen, I’m greatly obliged to you. Dr. Raglan,” she paused, “is it possible that you attend the cottage hospital here?”
“I am one of the surgeons, yes.”
“The policeman who was so unfortunately run over, how is he?”
“Not conscious yet. He’s had a very nasty knock.”
“Funny it should be the A.C.”—the Superintendent corrected himself—” Major Littleton, that run him down. He’s always one to be thoughtful for the men. And him working out a traffic scheme to bring down the number of road accidents, too! Well, there’s no saying the funny way things’ll go,” said the Superintendent, who was reckoned something of a philosopher in the town, “a waggonload of monkeys is nothing, you might say, to Fate. Anything more I can do for you, ma’am?”
“You might let me know the result of the test with these.”
She indicated the two revolvers.
“Right you are. Anything else you’d care to see now?”
“One only. The Vicar’s cook.”
From that interview, on which no stress need be laid, Mrs. Bradley emerged a trifle flushed; but it was the flush of victory. Dr. Prichard, when he returned that evening, was given notice by the cook; an event less cataclysmic than that lady supposed, since, unknown to her, the Vicar had for months been summoning courage to get rid of her. “Leaving to be married,” was the cook’s excuse, and conflicting conjectures were made as to the swain; but the cook kept his name to herself, together with the fact that he was an unemployed garage hand, now upon the dole. All this was later. It is some tribute to Mrs. Bradley’s personality that on the day of their encounter the cook was left in tears, while no ripple disturbed the unblinking tranquillity of the other’s saurian gaze.
Mr. Mills, the Superintendent, and the cook between them had taken some two and a half hours to interview; highly-concentrated and intensive interviewing, which might have been expected to leave Mrs. Bradley exhausted. It did not, however. At the first newsagent’s shop she stopped her car and bought an armful of papers; one with a deep black border, Lord Comstock’s own organ of opinion, the others paying their tribute of ebony headlines to that least picturesque of robber-barons. There were interviews with the highly-respected suspects. There were photographs—a rival paper had somehow secured one of the late peer at the age of four, sullen, in Fauntleroy velvet and curls, and one at the age of eighteen, still sullen, with a caption where, by some compositor’s regrettable error, a superfluous “s” had crept in: THE MAN OF PROMISE(S). Mrs. Bradley read them all, holding the sheets with one hand, while with the other she wielded her lorgnettes. She read and re-read the tribute of the Archbishop and Sir Charles Hope-Fairweather.
“This has been a terrible shock to me,” stated His Grace, “the more so that I had long known the late Lord Comstock and was indeed with him very shortly before the tragic occurrence which has robbed British journalism of “—Mrs. Bradley could imagine the Archbishop hesitating at this point, murmuring de mortuis, and non-committally plunging—“a virile figure. Our long acquaintance was not always unchequered with differences. His most recent campaign had indeed given me considerable pain, and I felt it my duty to endeavour to restrain him in what I felt to be a course of action unbefitting his strictly Church upbringing. His death so closely following upon this interview was a considerable shock. He might be described as the most robust influence in British journalism of recent years. It is now over a quarter of a century since as a boy he was committed to my charge, and I have no hesitation in saying that he regarded me as a true friend; one who never flinched from the duty of recalling him when necessary to those Christian principles from which it is my belief that, in spite of recent aberrations, he had never in his heart of hearts departed. Modern England will mourn her strongest man.”
“In fact,” mused Mrs. Bradley, “exactly the same thing three times over. Let us see what Sir Charles has to say.”
Sir Charles, despairing of being able to voice one single word of praise for what Lord Comstock was, went off into panegyrics of what he might have been. “A sportsmanlike effort,” was Mrs. Bradley’s verdict, “considering that Comstock had probably been blackmailing him”; and she read the brief soldierly phrases with care.
“He had sound views on many political and Empire problems. That he was a man of immense energy cannot be denied. His patriotism was unquestioned. His potential influence for good can hardly be overestimated.”
Thus Sir Charles, all public-school tradition, refraining from hitting a man when he was down, and no doubt, like the Archbishop, muttering the Latin tag to himself. He was brief, however; for if one were to speak the truth, and yet record of such a person as Comstock nothing save good, there remained very little indeed to be said by any honest man.
There was a picture of Mr. Mills, taken at Cambridge, and looking a little too healthy, and jolly, and curly; all these the camera recorded, together with the strange flightiness a face acquires from having small eyes set too wide apart. Lady Selina’s consternation at the thought of having such a person inside her doors was, in face of this photograph, very easily explained. Mrs. Bradley was fond of her niece, and would have deplored as wholeheartedly as Lady Selina such an acquisition to the family. The family, however, if it displayed only a modicum of intelligence, was in no danger, and she explained as much at luncheon to a harassed mother whose only chick had not returned for food.
“My dear Selina, there’s nothing between these two that you need worry about.”
“But”—the hostess drew back, gave expert consideration to the food at her elbow, helped herself with discretion, yet amply—” but Adela, they’ve been meeting!”
“Of course they have. You put obstacles in their way. An obstacle is something to be surmounted. If you’d only taken the trouble to put a few in the Paradine boy’s path they’d be engaged by now.”
“But, dear, what could I do? I, couldn’t have that really dreadful young man here. I saw him—once.” She shuddered. “No, no, Adela.”
Mrs. Bradley, while mentally re-enacting the shudder, remained calm.
“Then don’t have the Paradine boy here either. Forbid him the house.”
“How can I possibly do that? What excuse could I make?”
“You might say,” Mrs. Bradley considered, wickedly smiling, “you might say that you thought Sally was seeing too much of him.”
“Darling Adela,” said Lady Selina, sighing, and absently helping herself to more green peas, “things always look so simple to you.”
“Do they?” Mrs. Bradley’s voice took a graver note. “I wish they did.”
But in the afternoon, about three, when Lady Selina was stertorously resting, a tap came at Mrs. Bradley’s door. (She, too, “rested” after lunch; she knew that the guest who neither rests nor writes letters puts too much strain upon a hostess.) To her call the door opened, revealing the small impish face of Sally Lestrange.
“Well, darling child,” said Mrs. Bradley who was walking about the largest guest-room, clad in a magnificent Chinese coat covered with dragons, from whose voluminous sleeve the dark barrel of a revolver peeped. “I suppose you know your mother is, very rightly, most incensed.”
“What on earth are you doing?” responded Sally, who had caught sight of the revolver.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Bradley, surprised, “that! Just a theory. Quite untenable, unfortunately. Where have you been?” She put down the small black weapon, tidying it into its leather case. “You oughtn’t to stay away from meals, you know, without warning or cause.”
“I’ve been snooping.”
“Indeed! And what have you discovered?”
“A lot. I’ve been talking to the servants and the policemen. Briggs, the gardener, is our chauffeur’s uncle. I know it sounds rather like the penknife of the gardener’s boy, but he is. D’you know what he says? He’s absolutely certain that he saw a woman go round that way.”
“Which way?”
“Round to the—north, I suppose it would be; the way the study window faces. And I don’t believe he remembers her coming back. And do you know what I think she did? Shot Lord Comstock—he was facing the window, wasn’t he?—and then just ducked round and hid in the sort of corner the study makes, jutting out. The office hasn’t got a window on that side; I rather particularly noticed it hadn’t. So she waits there, and hears all these other people jumping out of windows windows—Major Littleton made a fearful mess of the turf—and then she just strolls round after all the cars have gone.” Sally scribbled a rough plan with the best guest-room pen on the inviolate guest-room blotting-paper.
“Look, really, Aunt Adela. It’s quite sound. Here’s the place; nobody could see her there. Nobody would be likely to come round that way—”
“The gardener?”
“Why should he?”
“To get to the kitchen garden.”
“If he hadn’t got his vegetables in by twelve o’clock he ought to be ashamed of himself,” riposted Sarah virtuously, “and the cook would have his blood. As a matter of fact I asked her, and Lord Comstock likes very young peas, and they take ages to shell, so she’d got everything in that she wanted by eleven.”
Mrs. Bradley clapped delicately with her small yellow hands.
“Excellent, Sally! Nothing omitted except the most important thing.”
“I didn’t! I snooped for hours, I never took my nose off the ground, there’s absolutely nothing left out—”
“Except the motive.”
Sally was dashed for the moment.
“Oh, the motive! But then, when you’ve established how a thing was done, you can always think out a motive afterwards.”
Mrs. Bradley laughed, her sudden screech.
“All very well for detective fiction, dear child, but detection fact runs quite the other way.”
“It was a woman, all the same.”
“How can you tell? Don’t please say you’ve found the usual shred of cloth on the garden wall.”
“No, I didn’t, but I found heel marks. Outside the study on the grass, just where someone would stand to look in. She must have been tall. The windowsill’s round about five foot six from the ground. I measured it as well as I could.” And with pride Sally produced a small and wizened dressmaker’s tape-measure.
“May I ask how you were allowed to obtain all this information?”
“I know most of the people round here,” Sally answered innocently, “and pretty well all the policemen. I don’t drive awfully well, that great car takes half a mile to turn in, so I’m always getting summoned. Well, cautioned and my number taken. Same thing. It’s Walter Borthwick on duty up there now, and he’s engaged to one of the girls at our lodge, so he just winked the other eye. He thought it probably was a woman, too.”
“You shared your suspicions with him?”
“Well, I thought I might as well give him something to think about. One idea lasts Walter quite a long time. What we couldn’t make out was how she got away.”
“Or how she happened to have a revolver identical with the one on the desk,” said Mrs. Bradley a trifle tartly, but she was not as devastating as she might have been. This Sally, cheerful to the point of impudence, wildly investigating, more wildly arguing, was a Sally changed for the better. Mrs. Bradley had not much cared for the sulky adolescent of the day before, with her blighted love affair and her seclusion. It was remarkable that the girl had not as yet inquired for Mr. Mills; remarkable, and comforting from a family point of view.
“How do you know it was one of those revolvers?” Sally asked defiantly. “I suppose the police stuffed you up with that; always taking things for granted. I wouldn’t mind betting, Aunt Adela, here and now, that it was an absolutely different revolver; not either of those at all.”
“Two of a kind—coincidence. Three of a kind—a good deal the other side of improbable. I saw the bullet—unusual one; it was quite certainly from a .15. My dear child, find your motive, your state of mind. All these things—bullets, footprints—they all wait on that one fact. Don’t bother with all these people’s finger-prints; try to follow the whorls and convolutions of their minds.” Mrs. Bradley absently picked up the small gun in its leather sheath. “All the same, you’ve done remarkably well. Thanks, dear child.”
Sally slipped away. At the door she turned.
“Half a crown to sixpence on that bullet, Aunt Adela?”
“Done,” responded Mrs. Bradley, in a voice like the dropping of stone into a well; and was fingering her revolver again as the door closed.
Next morning, after a somewhat tropical breakfast of fruit and coffee, encouraged by the parrot with cries of “Give ’er a glass of beer, watch ’er put it down, hullo, smack!” Mrs. Bradley was summoned to the telephone, Alan Littleton’s voice came ghostly over the wires.
“Will you do something for me? How are you, I suppose I ought to ask first.”
“I’m well. No farther on, though. What is it you want?”
“I’ve been worrying over that policeman, poor chap; the one I ran down.”
“Would you like me to go and see how he is?”
“Bless you! Just what I was going to ask. And, look here—find out how they are off for money, will you? He’ll draw his insurance and so on, but that ought to go to the hospital. All the cottage hospitals are going broke with accidents brought in and never paying. Just find out, if you can, how things are, and offer to help his wife. I feel badly about this.”
“Why don’t you come down and do it yourself, Alan? And we can talk other matters over.”
The ghostly voice laughed, briefly.
“Hardly be in good taste, would it? I’m supposed to have had a hand in the business, you know. It was intimated that I had better stay where the official eye can find me if it wants. No country jaunts.”
“On account of the revolver?”
“And our personal feud, and opportunity, and half a dozen other things—what’s that?”
For Mrs. Bradley had been murmuring, in the manner of another eminent inquirer, Sir John Saumarez, a quotation from Shakespeare about opportunity; something to the effect that opportunity was the real culprit in all matters of crime. Major Littleton, a person on whom the point of quotations was blunted, save those which derived from Army or Police Regulations, replied without the reverence that better-educated persons accord to such hallowed platitudes:
“Well, of course, if a man isn’t there you can’t plug him.” And he returned to his urgency about the policeman.
“I’ll do it this morning,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Now listen to me, Alan. Where are you speaking from? Your own flat? You speak German, don’t you? Very well.” In a strong British accent Mrs. Bradley embarked upon a series of questions in that tongue, in which Sir Charles Hope-Fairweather figured literally as die Peitsche, the Whip; was there a woman in die Peitsche’s car? What like? What height? The answers were hesitating. There might have been. He certainly had seen a woman in the waiting car before he went into the house. Where was the car? In the loop of the drive. He thought it must have been a woman; it had a red hat, anyhow.
“Did you see that hat in the car you chased down the drive?”
“I don’t know. It was a saloon; the blind at the back was pulled down.”
“Was there a chauffeur?”
“No.”
“Whose was the chauffeur you saw afterwards?”
“Comstock’s.”
“He gave you the number of the car, didn’t he?”
“Yes. Wrong.”
“You know, Alan, that might be very interesting.”
“It made me look an absolute fool, if you call that interesting.”
“Was he acquainted with the Canon’s cook, do you know?”
“I didn’t happen to ask,” replied the ghostly voice, heavy with irony. “There had been a rather sudden death, and an accident or so just before I spoke to him—”
“Now, my dear boy, don’t be angry because I ask you a question and you don’t happen to know the answer.” Mrs. Bradley, under stress, had broken once more into English. “I’ll find out myself, and let you know.”
“Thanks,” said the voice, still ironic, “it would bring a ray of sunshine into my life to know for certain that that ensanguined fool—”
“Alan, Alan!”
“Was acquainted with the Canon’s cook.”
“Dear child, you’re in a temper,” said Mrs., Bradley calmly, “I think you’d better ring off now. Keep in touch with me, Alan.”
“Right. See my policeman for me.”
“I will,” said Mrs. Bradley reassuringly, and did. Sally drove her in that car which had been the means of introduction to so many of the local force to the cottage hospital, where a pleasant matron gave them news Nasty concussion, but hopeful. His wife was with him.
“Oh! I wonder if I might speak to her?” Mrs. Bradley asked, in tones that would have lured a dragon from its cave. The matron succumbed at once to the will of that strangely persuasive old lady in royal blue, and fetched in Mrs. Bartelmy, who stood miserably before them, her rid-rimmed blue eyes asking what the visitors could possibly want.
“How d’you do,” said Mrs. Bradley, with her curiously-high, old-fashioned handshake, “and please sit down, won’t you? What an anxious time this is! You must save yourself all you can.”
“Yes’m.” Mrs. Bartelmy sat, uncomfortably. Mrs. Bradley was a little overpowering, and it was Sally who set her at her ease.
“Your husband was so awfully kind to me once when I forgot my licence. And that time I ran into the sheep one market day. I mean, it might have been fearfully awkward for me, only he made everything all right. I’m so glad he’s better.”
Mrs. Bartelmy’s eyes began to fill again, and she muttered something about Alf always trying to do ’is best.
“This smash is such disgustingly bad luck. We were rather wondering—” the girl glanced at Mrs. Bradley; but before that lady could take up her cue, Mrs. Bartelmy had launched a torrent of words.
“Always on time, always out, even nights when there’s plenty’d wait about in shelter, always worrying to be doing right. Why, when ’e come to this morning I was there; and what’s the first thing ’e says? Not a word for me nor the children, nor where am I? Nor anything what you’d expect. He opens his eyes, and sees me there, and ’e says, if these was my dying words they’re gospel, ’e says, ‘Annie, I was on my right side!’” Mrs. Bartelmy wept.
“When he was run into? Was that what he meant? Well, my dear Mrs. Bartlemy, this kind matron says that you haven’t anything to fear for him, he’s out of danger; and now I’m just going to ask her to give you a tiny whiff of smelling salts so that you will be’able to be brave again, and tell me a little about yourself and the children.”
Mrs. Bartelmy sniffed, and whiffed; heard what Mrs. Bradley had to say, accepted with more tears what Mrs. Bradley had to bestow, gave two heartfelt handshakes, and returned comforted to her Alf.
Mrs. Bradley went, musing, Sally at her side, out to the car.
“Which way,” she demanded suddenly, “does Lord Comstock’s house lie?”
“I’ll drive you past it.”
Twenty minutes at speed down the green lanes brought them to a high red wall.
“This is it. I’ll go slowly, shall I?”
“Do, my dear.”
They cruised along, and at the gate halted for Mrs. Bradley to get out. A large policeman on duty there eyed her, as did several otherwise unoccupied persons come to gaze upon the spot where the murder was committed. Mrs. Bradley accosted none of them, and made no attempt to enter; but Sally at her side indicated the points of interest with all the fervour of a charabanc guide.
“Here we have the drive, you see how it goes. It’s about 150 yards to the house if you go direct, and about an extra 75 yards if you go round. That’s where Sir Charles left his car: you can’t see where Major Littleton left his, it’s behind the trees. You can’t see the bulge the study window makes, either, from here. Look here, Aunt Adela, wouldn’t you like to go in? Borthwick would let you.”
“Orders, miss,” said the large policeman; but dubiously.
“Thank you,” returned Mrs. Bradley pleasantly, “but I can see all I need from here.”
“You can’t see a thing. Those footprints ought to be grand still, there hasn’t been any rain since—”
Mrs. Bradley turned and eyed her pupil and niece.
“What did I tell you?”
“Yes, I know,” admitted Sally, shuffling, “motive and all that. But it does seem silly to absolutely neglect the other things.”
“We won’t do that,” returned Mrs. Bradley grimly. “Let us inspect the scene of the accident.”
They moved to the other side of the road, a godsend to the unoccupied curious round the gate. The road was macadamized, its surface dust revealed no tyre tracks that could be identified. Sally, the omniscient, had obtained a few details about the affair during her previous day’s snooping.
“There was some blood here,” she said in a detached manner, pointing to a patch of grass at the roadside near the wall, “but I expect they’ve cleaned it up. There were flies, rather.” She gave a little shudder which belied the detachment.
“Which way was our conscientious policeman riding? To or from Winborough?”
“Towards, I expect. He was going off duty. He was on his wrong side, you see, if the accident was here.”
“So was Alan Littleton, in that case. They were both going the same way.”
“Well, but—” Sarah hesitated. She held no brief for the A.C., but her own deductions were dear to her. “I know. This must be what happened. Bartelmy is riding somewhere about the middle of the road, Major Littleton comes haring out and bumps him on to his head and then drags him on to the grass just here.” She indicated the stained patch, and turned, preening herself a little, to receive praise; but her aunt, unimpressed, was surveying the opposite hedge with a bright eye cocked sideways.
“D’you cut your holly in these parts?”
Sally read no Kipling; she remembered nothing of “that sacred tree which no woodman touches without orders”; but she had lived in the country all her life, and had an indignant answer ready.
“Of course not; not in hedges. It isn’t lucky.”
“I see,” said Mrs. Bradley gravely, examining a sturdy holly twig which had been broken short to the general hedge-level. “Then there’s somebody hereabouts, a stranger probably, who’s not superstitious.”
The matter of the cook’s acquaintanceship with that chauffeur who had so annoyingly given Major Littleton the wrong number of a fleeing car was soon settled. It was done circuitously, to the accompaniment of helpless disapproval from Lady Selina, who, though she thought it her duty to see that her staff went to church and saw doctors, objected to intruding upon what she called their private lives.
“They have just as much right to their love-affairs,” said Lady Selina, devouring asparagus with ladylike greed, “as we have.” She looked round; the butler was not in the room. “I mean, naturally, I don’t allow the younger maids to have followers, and Strutt and Malkin are long past that age, and I never would have young menservants because it always makes trouble; but apart from that I do think one ought not to interfere.”
“My dear Selina,” implored Mrs. Bradley, “calm yourself. I do not propose to throw any further grit into Canon Pritchard’s domestic machine.” She eyed Sally blandly; Sally, that accomplished snooper, dear to servants and aware of all the relationships for miles around. The hint was taken, grinning; Lord Comstock’s chauffeur that day was to be Sally’s job.
This was a relief to Mrs. Bradley, who privately considered her niece’s cure not yet so complete that she could be allowed with any safety within the walls which harboured the unjustly accused Mr. Edward Mills. She issued further instructions, when Lady Selina was well out of earshot, by which her assistant was empowered to draw up a plan of Comstock’s garden, drive, and the road beyond it. This settled, she went off alone to Winborough.
“Mills again?” said the Superintendent. “Well, I suppose you can see him. I’ve got some news for you, after.”
Mrs. Bradley declined the proffered privilege of a look at Mr. Mills. That unfortunate, she learnt, had been throwing his weight about, such as it was; he was a nuisance, and the Superintendent, confidentially, did not agree that there was any need for his detention.
“A young fellow like that stand up to a bully like Comstock, and shoot him in front? Not much,” said Easton. “Why, the first thing he asked me to send out for was, what d’you think? A solicitor? No! A bottle of brilliantine and some pills.”
Mrs. Bradley agreed that Mr. Mills in the rôle of violent criminal was unconvincing, and brought the official back to his point of departure.
“Well, Superintendent! And what is this treat you have in store for me?”
“Ah! Now you’re asking.”
He went to a drawer, unlocked it with precautions, and returned bearing an envelope strengthened with cardboard; the kind of envelope in which photographs are despatched.
“It’s about those guns,” said he.
“Ah, yes,” Mrs. Bradley was grave at once. “The tests. What news?”
“Mighty funny news,” returned the Superintendent. “News that turns the whole case upside down. Look.” He spread before her, like a hand at poker, five photographs. Two of these were pictures of the mushroomed bullet, immensely magnified, showing the striations made by the revolver barrel. Numbers three and four were labelled: “Test bullets fired from .15 red label.”
“That was Comstock’s own?” she asked.
“Mills says so. Just you look at the marks. I’ve got a reading-glass here if you want.”
But Mrs. Bradley waved it away, and used her lorgnettes. She spent two full minutes over the photographs of the mushroomed bullet; two more over the photograph of “red label”; then put both quietly down.
“It wasn’t fired from that gun.”
“No more it was. Try the other.”
The other was the revolver which Alan Littleton had carried. She took up the picture and lifted her glasses—ten seconds later she dropped them with an exclamation.
“Eh?” said Easton jovially. “Thought that’d get you. It did me. Couldn’t believe my eyes for the moment. Not a mark the same; not the faintest resemblance. Didn’t I say you could never be up to Fate? Not if you were as clever as a wagon-load of monkeys with their tails burnt off. Now that means, as of course you understand, ma’am, that we’ve got to look for a third gun. More trouble for us, but it lets out Major Littleton, and I’m glad of it.”
Mrs. Bradley was still staring down at the photographs, still tapping them with her lorgnettes, and her bright dark eyes were dull as pebbles. She came to herself with a start at the Assistant Commissioner’s name.
“What’s that? Oh yes, Major Littleton. Obviously not from his gun, but a?15 bullet all the same, Inspector. What, then, is the official explanation of the single spent shell in the revolver that was on the desk?”
“Easy. Mr. Mills put us on to it. Wonder we overlooked it; it’s kept us barking up the wrong tree all this time. Why, it never was fired that day at all! Mills says his employer used to pot at rabbits with it of an evening, from the window. Butler corroborates. Funny thing to do; why, you’d only wound the animal, if you did hit one, with a toy like this—”
“Lord Comstock had no prejudice against inflicting suffering,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Yes? And so this probably was fired at another time altogether?”
“That’s right. Then he might run a rag through the barrel next day and not notice the shell; this make doesn’t throw ’em out, you know. So there we’ve been, from the Home Secretary down to your humble, all sweating our souls out (pardon me) over a bullet that’s down a burrow this fortnight.”
The Superintendent laughed with extreme heartiness at the idea of the Home Secretary and a whole assembly of other distinguished persons thus ironically employed. Mrs. Bradley, however, did not laugh. She was horribly white, and her small alert face seemed sunken into twenty new wrinkles all in a moment. The Inspector, with a quick glance at a subordinate who stood by, conjured up a glass of water for her, and proffered it firmly, with apologies for not having anything stronger. She sipped it civilly, set it down, rose, took adequate leave with thanks; but her gallant bearing had much ado to carry off the small stricken face atop.
“It’s what I always say,” said Ea,ston to the subordinate after her departure, “you can’t be up to women, try how you will. I’ve seen a woman tried for murder lend her handkerchief to the wardress when the judge put on the cap. And there’s my own wife; if I broke my leg to-morrow, nothing’d be too good for me, and yet if I was to break a vase to-night she’d give me hell. You can’t be up to ’em. Now, this Mrs. Bradley, she’s a sensible woman and she knows which end of a gun the shot comes out of; and Major Littleton is a friend of hers. Yet you see!”
“The relief,” opined the subordinate. “It makes you come weak at the knees.”
“Weak in the head, you mean,” rejoined his superior vaguely, but with intent to rebuke. “When you’re my age, you’ll get over trying to find a reason for anything a woman does. Get a move on.”
After dinner, which was oddly silent, but also, a good excuse for the silence, remarkably succulent, Mrs. Bradley went off alone, wandering into the near-by wood. She had refused the company of Sally, and gently set aside the suggestion of Lady Selina that they should play a fiendish form of joint patience called “backbite.” Lady Selina was as sulky as an excellent meal’s aftermath would permit, for she had not only been foiled in an attempt to ask Dick Paradine to dinner, but had actually been obliged to listen to a treacly commendation of Mr. Mills from her sister-in-law in her daughter’s presence; everything extolled, his curls, his innocence, his devotion. It was a little too much even for Sally, who, to Mrs. Bradley’s encomium of his hands—which were fattish and hairy, a very weak point—replied uncomfortably that anyhow they were pretty strong, and changed the subject. Somehow Mr. Mills in captivity lost some of his charm, as do certain animals. Lady Selina had the wisdom to know that her sister-in-law’s treatment of the affair was the right and effective one; but it is always galling to see a stranger easily succeeding where reproaches from those who should be the rebel’s nearest and dearest so lamentably fail. She did not interfere, therefore; but she was in a temper, a fact appreciated both by her daughter and her guest. A glance from Mrs. Bradley, refusing escort on her stroll, implored her fellow-sleuth’s co-operation; a word, spoken low as the tray with coffee was taken jangling up, secured it.
“Be good, please, child.”
Followed a miracle. Sally of her own accord approached the baize-covered table, suggesting herself as fellow-backbiter; and on Lady Selina’s reluctant but acquiescent smile, Mrs. Bradley departed unquestioned through an open French-window, towards the wood. She had her great brocade work-bag slung upon her arm, out of which, in the green seclusion of the trees, she produced a small revolver, though not so small as those in the hands of the police, a few brass-shod cartridges, and the dark tubular cap of a silencer. With these she went through various man(ce)uvres, firing bullets into a piece of 3/4-inch plank which she set up against a tree for the purpose. All her movements were business-like, unhurried, and sure; some of them, to an observer, would have been puzzling. For when she had fired three times she took from the brocade bag, inexhaustible apparently as Mrs. Robinson’s of the Swiss Family, a small pair of scissors, the back of whose blades was roughened to the semblance of a file. This, breaking the revolver, she applied to some small part, a mysterious performance no more than ten seconds long. A moment’s thought; then she stooped, and did some other inexplicable thing with a small ramrod and a handful of earth; loaded again and fired, with seeming carelessness and extreme accuracy, until six bullet holes stood in a neat row along her piece of wood, the bullets themselves remaining embedded. Then she put all her paraphernalia back into the magnificent bag, covered the collection with hanks of coloured wools, and came strolling back to the drawing-room as the gilt Cupid adorning Lady Selina’s mantelpiece struck ten times with a hammer on his bell.
Mother and daughter were still bent over their cards. They played for counters, yellow, red, and white, which were gathered mostly under Lady Selina’s hand; that lady was beaming.
“Unlucky at cards,” said Mrs. Bradley to Sally. “I must tell Mr. Mills.”
“I’m lucky at sleuthing, anyhow,” returned Sally, reddening. “What about that half-crown?”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs Bradley, and her voice suddenly was lifeless. “Perhaps you owe me sixpence.”
“What? Was it really another gun that shot him?”
“Give ’er air, give ’er a glass of beer, that’s right, pop!” The parrot, waking from his drowse upon the perch, checked Sally’s movement, and her mother’s remonstrances concerning the unsuitability of crime as a drawing-room topic checked further speech. Mrs. Bradley, looking ill, went out of the room and without further explanation to bed. She had concluded her investigations.
From Mrs. Bradley’s diary:
June 14th.
Sensation! Somebody, whose public - spiritedness cannot be too highly commended, has shot Lord Comstock in his own house. A. L., strangely enough on the spot, and gave me full details. (Follow the circumstances of the crime, so far as these were known at the time of Major Littleton’s message.)
It is impossible really to blame anyone, with the single exception of His Grace the Archbishop, who ought to have brought up the late C. better while he had his hands on him.
June 15th.
All still agog with the murder. Ferdinand has arranged for me to have facilities for inquiry. Bless the boy! Accordingly, to kill two birds with one stone, went to-day to interview E. Mills, who is detained on suspicion. Quite awful! Sally must have been out of her mind with boredom to have considered him for one moment. Her mother’s fault, of course. He represented romance, though he has hands like suet puddings. A little judicious encouragement would have worked wonders. However.
M. is quite obviously not guilty. He is terrified, because he is playing a double game, and is afraid that this will come out and debar him from future employment. There is a good old Scots word, spunk, which means, I believe, tinder; he has none. No affront, no bullying could ever strike a spark out of him. An unpleasing specimen. May be safely left out of all calculations, even Sally’s.
Saw the guns in question; also the bullet, but only a microscope would reveal anything there. Curious about the one empty shell, and the clean barrel. It looks rather as though somebody had intended to clean it completely and had been disturbed. But surely one would remove the shell first of all? Difficult.
Interviewed Vicar’s cook. Red-headed, handsome, truculent; the sort that would bully a decent man to death, and work her hands to the bone for a waster. Admits joy-ride with latter in Vicar’s car, thus making a curious coincidence. (See trial of Frenchwoman who stated that the burglars who murdered her husband were dressed as stage Jews. Burglars disproved, but three costumes such as she described had been stolen from the Jewish Theatre that very night. The long arm of coincidence is really endless!) The chauffeur’s statement, confusing numbers of the cars, pure malice probably. Had seen the Vicar’s car out, and thought he would give the joy-riders a fright. Sally must inquire.
Disposed of two further suspects on way home in car. Sir Charles H.-F. could never, NEVER, shoot a quarry sitting. (C. may have been standing, but morally the analogy holds.) Sir Charles would not know what to do with a revolver. An elephant-rifle, 12-bore, or fists are his weapons. Possibly, if driven beyond endurance, a horsewhip. Nothing so unsportsmanlike as a revolver. (The bullet was fired from one, that is quite conclusive.)
H. G. the Archbishop, also discharged without a stain on character, except that noted under yesterday’s date. Read his message to the press, and came to the conclusion (irresistible) that he could never have rested content with one shot, even if that had done the business. Tautologous by nature, as all ex-schoolmasters are. Could not have resisted repeating himself. Pistol would have been another matter. Revolver, and only one shot fired, puts him out of court. A relief. One does not like to think of the scandal, had it been otherwise.
Remains Farrant, the butler, A. L. (but not likely), and Person Unknown. Query, lady with Sir Charles?
This theory supported by Sally’s information. (Too enthusiastic, but probable.) Woman hid in blind corner beyond window. Difficulty of getting away. Bribe to gardener? Unlikely. If so, a tall woman. Worth considering. (Sally displaying common sense, glad to say.) Trouble here is to discover how woman could have come into possession of one of the weapons. Query, bullet may not belong to either? (Remember Sally bet 2s. 6d. to 6d. that it did not.)
Memo.—Sudden thought. How if spent cartridges had been transferred to C.’s gun from guilty weapon, with a view to making crime appear suicide? This illustrates a murderous device I have not so far seen used, but which I believe was begun here and interrupted. There was no blackening round C.’s wound; this a second shot (blank) fired from his own gun at close quarters would have supplied. (The noise of the shots would be negligible; the fatal shot was, in fact, either not heard at all, or not identified. A revolver-shot is nothing like the crash of a falling table, or a thumped fist. It is a short, sharp sound, more like the bursting of a tyre.) The assailant, having wiped the gun, would close the still warm fingers of the victim round it, and make off. Comstock’s temperament a possible one for suicide, which would support the illusion.
Objection.—This would imply that the assailant concerned did not know that the bullets from two different guns can be identified. Therefore, no expert, and not A. L. Thank God. (Note for future use: even this objection does not apply to shot-guns. Small shot does not take the markings of the bore.)
June 16th.
Went to see injured policeman, at A. C.’s request. Not visible, but out of danger. Saw wife, who reported first coherent statement. “I was on my right side, Annie.” Query, a reference to the accident? Examined site of collision. Blood on wrong side road, but broken holly in the hedge (right side) with other damage, looked as though a heavy body had fallen on it. Possibly the bicycle? But A. L. is confident P.C. was on wrong side of road. Accident difficult to understand, even so. Road visible for fifty yards down drive, and P.C. was well past, going in same direction, when hit; must have been full in view, unless cycling at high rate of speed, for at least three seconds. Alan an expert driver. A mere detail, but worrying. He is always so concerned for the men under him, and so censorious of drivers who cause this sort of accident.
A visit to the police. Photographs shown me of the original bullet and the tests. Marks on the murderous bullet do not coincide with either of the two guns in police possession. An idea sprang into my mind, but I must prove it before I even commit it to paper. It was a considerable shock to me, as I am afraid the Inspector perceived. Horrible! I felt quite sick all day.
June 17th.
I tested my conjecture last night; afterwards with my watchmaker’s glass scrutinized the six bullets, and I have my proof.
Reconstruction.—One must suppose that Alan Littleton went through the book-concealed door immediately the Archbishop left. I cannot exactly state the cause of quarrel; but C. was working to deprive Alan of his job, and had, we know, a most bitter tongue. I imagine that the shooting, though not premeditated, was deliberate, possibly in answer to some gesture of C.’s, pulling his own gun from the drawer, where, according to Mills, he usually kept it. Alan Littleton knows all about firearms; I believe that the sham suicide plan (see entry under June 15) occurred to him, and was halfway to execution when a sound disturbed him. Query, Sir Charles trying the door? “Attempt but not deed confounds us.” He leapt out of the study window, jumping well to the left according to the prints, which come under the drawing-room window in Sally’s plan. His first argument would run like this:
“I must pretend to have found Comstock dead—murdered, since I had not time to give the blackening shot. This car is my excuse for getting away; it may be the murderer escaping. I must give chase.”
But by the time he has got into his own car this argument changes its complexion.
“If I overtake this car, I must challenge the driver. That means revealing that Comstock is dead. But possibly his body will not be found, if I leave things alone, for another half-hour. I must play for time. I must have an excuse for not overtaking this car.”
The policeman, quietly bicycling by, supplies this excuse. Alan Littleton deliberately drove into him from behind, and concocted the story of his being on the wrong side; trusting (a) to the macadamized road leaving no traces of the accident, (b) to the blood on the wrong side where he laid the unfortunate man, (c) to the concussion leaving only a confused memory of the actual occurrence. Here he miscalculated, as Mrs. Bartelmy’s story clearly shows. It will be a danger point for him, if the investigations should ever get on the right line.
His story about the petrol is not true. The tank was full as usual, but he needed an excuse for delay, and therefore poured the petrol out of the tin when he came to a secluded place. (He displayed powers of quick thinking and resource, to say nothing of courage, throughout the whole business.) This secluded place was probably a lane on the road to the hospital, which I noted as being very suitable for such a purpose; a sharp turn, shielded by a high hedge and trees. I believe that a search along the border here to try and discover where the petrol was spilt would certainly reveal some traces, either of dead grass or earth disturbed. He drove in to this lane with Bartelmy unconscious beside him; who, however, might regain consciousness at any moment. There was much to be done, and he must have moved quickly. His immediate object was to deface the inner barrel of the revolver in his pocket before handing it over to the police, who would inevitably ask for it. He did this by a simple method which I have myself tried out, scratching the barrel thoroughly with earth or sand. This process would take five minutes; the removal of every grain of sand possibly longer. He must have filed the tip of the striking pin, which can be done with a pocket file, or a thin rough stone. It is an infallible way of changing a gun’s personality, but only a man with considerable knowledge of firearms would have thought of it. He completed his task, and arrived at the hospital at the hour he stated.
My case is clear, but it cannot ever be proved. The bullet which killed Comstock was fired from a weapon whose characteristics have been destroyed for ever. But Alan Littleton is a man of probity and honour, and if an innocent person is accused I have no doubt that he will speak. Meanwhile, until then I shall hold my tongue, and record it as my conviction that there are occasions when killing is no murder. The late Lord C. is very much better dead.
Irony! After all my lectures to Sally, I have my crime complete, with footprints, bloodstains, and the rest of the detection-story paraphernalia all in its right place. The only thing lacking is the motive, into which I do not propose to inquire further. I am satisfied that, in spite of the revolver in Alan’s pocket, the crime was not planned, and that the various emergencies were met with quick thinking as they arrived. I do not think this death will lie heavy upon A.’s conscience; but if Bartelmy dies, I believe the guilt of that will haunt him to the end of his days. Crimes, like sorrows, never go singly.
N.B.—To quiet suspicion, and encourage the third-gun theory, I had better pay Sally her half-crown.