The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (26 page)

‘In the drawer under the chopping-block or the counter,' grinned the superintendent, whom they had picked up at the police station. He jerked at a brass handle.

‘Here we – By gum! It is, too! What about this, Grindy?'

The inspector leapt to his side as he drew out a skull.

‘But how did you
know?
' asked Aubrey, later.

‘By taking thought, child, and by musing on the vagaries of human nature. Consider. This affair was so neat. Now murder is not usually a neat crime. Theft can be neat. So can forgery. Seduction and even arson can be classed among the finer arts. But murder – no. Your murderer is a person of greed or passion. He is in the grip of the primitive. And the primitive is invariably untidy. I considered that a man who would disjoint a body so efficiently, and clear up the mess after himself, and dispose of the human joints upon meat-hooks in that passionate tidy way, was no ordinary person. That was why I immediately dismissed James Redsey from my mind. I don't say that James could not commit a murder. Most of us could. Most of us would, too, but for some natural fear of the consequences, or some unnatural inhibition which frustrates our desires. But James did not dismember the corpse, and James is not tidy – no, not even when he digs a hole in which to bury a body! And he is extraordinarily true to type. There isn't an original streak in the whole of the young man's mentality. I have ceased to consider him as a carver of bodies and a person who runs about the countryside conveying skulls from place to place. Never mind! We have quite a number of extraordinarily constituted persons living among us. I made a list of them. First there is the Reverend Stephen Broome.'

‘The vicar?' Aubrey's voice was shrill.

‘Yes, my dear. A man who takes the clock to bed with him, and thrusts other people's vases and cut glass preserve jars into his pockets, and is as appallingly absent-minded and forgetful as that poor dear man, is a very pretty study for a psycho-analyst.'

‘Oh – that,' said Aubrey, disappointed. ‘I thought you meant old Broome had done the murder.'

‘Then,' continued Mrs Bradley, ignoring the remark, ‘there is your own mother. Mrs Bryce Harringay is a remarkable woman, and – a point which everybody seems to have overlooked – she had a very good motive for getting both Sethleigh and Redsey out of the way.'

Aubrey giggled.

‘Hang it all!' he said. ‘I mean to say – the mater! She couldn't cut short the life of a blackbeetle!'

Mrs Bradley smiled sympathetically, but shook her head.

‘Your mother is very fond of you,' she said. ‘And fond mothers will do the most curious things in an attempt to achieve material welfare for their children. If Sethleigh and Redsey were out of the way, you, young man, would be the heir to the whole of the family property.'

‘Yes – if Sethleigh and Redsey were out of the way,' said Aubrey.

‘Well' – Mrs Bradley rapped out the word like a shot – ‘who first turned the attention of the police to Sethleigh's disappearance? Who informed them that she had seen the two cousins disappearing into the woods at seven fifty-five that Sunday evening? Nobody else saw them go there together! Nobody else swears positively to the time! If Sethleigh were murdered and Redsey hanged, they
would
both be out of the way!' She concluded this extraordinary exposition with hooting laughter.

Aubrey straightened himself. He had been lying back in Mrs Bradley's most comfortable deck-chair, arms behind head, feet up, listening with tremendous amusement to Mrs Bradley's theories. This last one, however, was a direct challenge. He sat up, put his feet to the ground, one on either side of the footrest, and leaned forward.

‘Yes, but the mater – she isn't that sort of person. I mean – well, she just wouldn't! And as for cutting up the body –'

‘Exactly.' Mrs Bradley nodded. ‘So much so that I almost think we might leave her out of a list of possible suspects. Character, habits of mind, social customs – these things are of boundless importance in a case of this kind. And your mother would not have moved the skull from Culminster to Bossbury.'

‘Why wouldn't she?' asked Aubrey curiously. ‘Of course, I know she didn't because she wasn't the murderer, but what makes you say –'

‘Then there are the two young men and the one young woman who live in the Cottage on the Hill,' Mrs Bradley went on serenely. ‘Wright – an artist. That is, in the popular conception, a man without morals, personal decency, or legal obligations. A pariah, an outcast, an unscrupulous dodger of debts. A promiscuous sitter on other people's unmade beds, a habitant of yet other people's made ones. A sipper of absinthe and imbiber of cocoa. A creature long-haired, filthy, depraved, and mentally unbalanced. A cocaine fiend, a dram drinker, an apostle of obscenity, lust, and freedom.'

‘Thanks,' said Aubrey gratefully. ‘I've got all that down in shorthand. Stafford Major called
me
a bug-hunting stinker last term!'

‘Wright,' went on Mrs Bradley, relinquishing her platform voice for something a little less forceful, ‘is just the sort of person who would think it funny to hang human joints on hooks. He is certainly capable of murder. He could have stolen the skull from his own studio most convincingly, and he could have substituted the coconut for it. He is capable of thinking out that clever touch of inserting a tiny living plant in the skull's jaws to make it appear that it had been buried in the cliff far longer than was actually the case, and he would have had the forethought to plant the big clump of thrift over it to conceal the spot. He is stupid enough to have picked out the largest and most attractive clump of thrift he could find, too.'

‘How do you mean?' asked Aubrey, who had finished transcribing Mrs Bradley's remarks about artists into long-hand and now felt that he possessed sufficient verbal ammunition to account for three or four Staffords Major at the beginning of the next school term.

‘He picked out a clump of flowering plant which immediately attracted the attention of those young people who came to camp on the shore,' said Mrs Bradley. ‘Shortsighted, that. He should have picked out a less noticeable clump of thrift.'

‘Yes. Yes, it was shortsighted, wasn't it? Still, jolly difficult to see how old Wright could have done the actual murder,' said Aubrey, weighing it up. ‘He had a pretty sound alibi, you see.'

‘How do you know that?' Mrs Bradley's voice was sharper than usual.

‘Church until a quarter to eight.'

‘Granted and proved.' Mrs Bradley nodded.

‘Met Margery Barnes at a quarter to nine.'

‘Who told you that, child? I thought nobody knew that he was the man she met in the woods! She told
me
, of course, but –'

‘Well, she told me too. Only yesterday, though. Said she'd told you, and so she supposed it didn't matter about telling other people. Made me swear to keep mum when the doctor was about, though.'

‘The doctor?'

‘Yes. Margery's pater. I say, I suppose
he
wasn't Jack the Ripper?'

‘Jack the – ?'

‘The jolly old murderer, you know.'

‘I was coming to him. Doctors have been known to commit these crimes. There was Dr Crippen.'

‘Oh, yes. Old Cora asked for it, though, didn't she?'

‘I dare say Rupert Sethleigh asked for it, too,' said Mrs Bradley tartly. ‘That is the worst of a crime like murder. One's sympathies are so often with the murderer. One can see so many reasons why the murdered person was – well, murdered. The chief fault I have to find with most murderers is that they lack a sense of humour.'

‘But you just said that Cleaver Wright –'

‘I know, child. I know. And it almost, but not quite, persuades me to leave him out of the list of suspects. He
has
a sense of humour – morbid, perhaps, but real. I almost think I must acquit him.'

‘But what has a sense of humour to do with it?' Aubrey asked, lying back in his chair again.

‘Everything, child. Lack of humour means lack of balance. Lack of balance implies mental instability. Mental instability is, logically, madness. All murders are committed by lunatics. I am referring to premeditated murders, of course.'

‘Really? Do you mean all murderers are mad?'

‘Except me. And my outrageous sanity is in itself a kind of mental defect, I sometimes think.'

She chuckled. Aubrey grinned lazily.

‘But you haven't told me yet about moving the skull,' he said.

‘You remember playing a little game at my house?'

‘Oh, yes. We all played it, didn't we? Go on.'

‘That's all,' said Mrs Bradley. ‘Think it out, child.'

‘We all wrote down where we thought the skull was hidden,' said Aubrey slowly. ‘And – I've got it! Think so, anyway! Somebody who played that game thought you were getting a bit too hot on the subject of the skull, so they moved it. Idiots! Much better have left it alone.'

‘Well, I don't know,' said Mrs Bradley, frowning thoughtfully. ‘It wasn't the murderer who played this game of Hunt the Thimble with the skull, you see.'

‘Oh, you know who – you know – I mean, how do you know that? Do you know who the murderer is?'

‘I know that the man who moved that skull from Culminster to Bossbury was a man in a panic,' said Mrs Bradley, ‘and that the murderer is not in a panic. He feels perfectly secure. And upon my word,' she concluded vigorously, ‘if I didn't feel certain that the police will sooner or later make out a case against some innocent person, I would leave him in peace. Rupert Sethleigh –' She stopped. After all, this charming, serious boy was related to the murdered man.

Aubrey nodded.

‘Asked for it,' he continued. ‘Yes, he did, didn't he? “Rupert Sethleigh – Bounder” ought to be on his tombstone.'

‘Still, I fancy that when we come to the end of these complicated affairs we may discover that it was a case of diamond cut diamond,' amended Mrs Bradley, completely serious for once.

The Story of a Crime

‘T
HE
policy of
laissez faire
, exemplified by some of our leading statesmen during the eighteenth century,' observed Mrs Bradley, fixing a beady, bird-like, sharp black eye upon the Vicar of Wandles Parva, who, absent-minded as usual, was endeavouring to insert a small but valuable silver vase, happily empty of water, into the right-hand pocket of his best alpaca jacket, ‘has its application even at the present day.'

‘My dear man!' exclaimed Mrs Bryce Harringay in horror, grasping the charming little receptacle very hastily and rising to restore it to its former position on Mrs Bradley's drawing-room mantelpiece. ‘It can't be kleptomania in a gentleman of his profession,' she confided in a sibilant aside to the owner of the vase, ‘so it must be pure absent-mindedness.'

‘Not kleptomania, no,' replied Mrs Bradley composedly, but turning suddenly and terrifyingly serious. ‘That has become a mere police-court term to account for the astonishing vagaries of the idle rich.' Her mirthless cackle added ironic corollary to the theorem.

‘I believe the young people have concluded their game,' said Mrs Bryce Harringay. ‘It sounds like it.'

‘Then I expect they would like some tea,' said the hostess, rising to ring the bell. ‘Shall we go into the garden?'

The young people, consisting of Felicity Broome, Margery Barnes, Aubrey, and Jim, had been playing croquet on the lawn. It was a beautiful lawn, admirably kept, but none of the four cared for playing croquet upon any lawn whatsoever. However, their hostess, with a determined frown upon her forehead and a vinegary grin upon her lips, had insisted upon pressing mallets and balls upon them, and herself had placed the hoops ready for play. It was impossible to refuse to fall in with the arrangements. Mrs Bryce Harringay beamed approval.

‘A most delightful pastime, most!' she observed largely, waving her plump white hands in a kind of careless benediction upon the incensed Aubrey, the embarrassed James, the giggling Margery, and the shrugging philosophical Miss Broome. ‘So good for the manners! So suitable for a summer day! A most attractive game, most!'

‘There,' said Mrs Bradley to Aubrey, who promptly smacked his ball through the open gate into the road, where it trickled merrily downhill for a hundred yards or more, ‘now you can squabble and fight and lose your tempers and accuse each other of cheating for at least an hour, while we old, decrepit persons engage one another in gentle conversation punctuated by snatches of sleep.'

She waved a skinny claw at them, watched Aubrey stalk moodily off to recover his ball, and then she went into the house.

At tea the conversation turned inevitably upon the murder. ‘I wonder who on earth it can be? The inspector is getting absolute wind-up. I should think the police will be compelled to make some sort of a move soon, with all the newspapers shouting at them like this,' said Aubrey to Mrs Bradley.

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘I wonder they don't pay more attention to Mr Savile,' said Felicity. ‘He can't show an alibi for the evening of June 22nd. He attempted to kill you in the Manor Woods –'

Mrs Bradley chuckled.

‘Aubrey here told the inspector so,' she said, ‘and there is no doubt that Sethleigh used to meet Lulu Hirst in the Cottage and also in the Manor Woods. And Mr Wright did some curious things on the night of the murder. So did Mr Broome,' she added, grinning.

‘Attempted to kill you?' exclaimed Mrs Bryce Harringay. ‘Good gracious! When was this?'