The Worsted Viper (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

  Titles by Gladys Mitchell

  Speedy Death (1929)

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1930)

  The Longer Bodies (1930)

  The Saltmarsh Murders (1932)

  Death at the Opera (1934)

  The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935)

  Dead Men’s Morris (1936)

  Come Away, Death (1937)

  St Peter’s Finger (1938)

  Printer’s Error (1939)

  Brazen Tongue (1940)

  Hangman’s Curfew (1941)

  When Last I Died (1941)

  Laurels Are Poison (1942)

  Sunset Over Soho (1943)

  The Worsted Viper (1943)

  My Father Sleeps (1944)

  The Rising of the Moon (1945)

  Here Comes a Chopper (1946)

  Death and the Maiden (1947)

  The Dancing Druids (1948)

  Tom Brown’s Body (1949)

  Groaning Spinney (1950)

  The Devil’s Elbow (1951)

  The Echoing Strangers (1952)

  Merlin’s Furlong (1953)

  Faintley Speaking (1954)

  On Your Marks (1954)

  Watson’s Choice (1955)

  Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (1956)

  The Twenty-Third Man (1957)

  Spotted Hemlock (1958)

  The Man Who Grew Tomatoes (1959)

  Say it With Flowers (1960)

  The Nodding Canaries (1961)

  My Bones Will Keep (1962)

  Adders on the Heath (1963)

  Death of a Delft Blue (1964)

  Pageant of Murder (1965)

  The Croaking Raven (1966)

  Skeleton Island (1967)

  Three Quick and Five Dead (1968)

  Dance to Your Daddy (1969)

  Gory Dew (1970)

  Lament for Leto (1971)

  A Hearse on May-Day (1972)

  The Murder of Busy Lizzie (1973)

  A Javelin for Jonah (1974)

  Winking at the Brim (1974)

  Convent on Styx (1975)

  Late, Late in the Evening (1976)

  Noonday and Night (1977)

  Fault in the Structure (1977)

  Wraiths and Changelings (1978)

  Mingled with Venom (1978)

  Nest of Vipers (1979)

  The Mudflats of the Dead (1979)

  Uncoffin’d Clay (1980)

  The Whispering Knights (1980)

  The Death-Cap Dancers (1981)

  Lovers Make Moan (1981)

  Here Lies Gloria Mundy (1982)

  Death of a Burrowing Mole (1982)

  The Greenstone Griffins (1983)

  Cold, Lone and Still (1983)

  No Winding-Sheet (1984)

  The Crozier Pharaohs (1984)

  Gladys Mitchell writing as Malcolm Torrie

  Heavy as Lead (1966)

  Late and Cold (1967)

  Your Secret Friend (1968)

  Churchyard Salad (1969)

  Shades of Darkness (1970)

  Bismarck Herrings (1971)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © The Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1943.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer Seattle 2014

  www.apub.com

  First published in Great Britain in 1943 by Michael Joseph.

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  E-ISBN: 9781477868867

  A Note about This E-Book

  The text of this book has been preserved from the original British edition and includes British vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation, some of which may differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, with only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  • CHAPTER 1 •

  “So she stood still where she was and waited”

  —From Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

  Like most distinguished people, Mrs. Bradley was not unaccustomed to fanmail, often of a peculiar kind. This kind was the anonymous letter. She had received a good many anonymous letters in her time, and therefore was not unduly perturbed to be handed one morning at breakfast, some three years before this story can truly be said to have opened, the following communication:

  “Madam (if that is what you call yourself, you old devil), His Majesty’s Pleasure, is it? Ha! Ha! Watch out, you sanctified old she-monster! Stars and stripes, you ruddy female man-eater, we’ll get you where Bone is, you undraped Thessalonian reconstruction. Yah!”

  Mrs. Bradley studied it with an appreciative eye. Bone, the murderer (under circumstances which suggested that he was a Satanist) of a woman of the streets, one Minnie Baum, had been saved from the hangman by a verdict of Guilty but Insane, and had been sent to Broadmoor to be detained, in the dignified, obsolete phrase, “during His Majesty’s pleasure.” There appeared to be those who considered his detention unjust.

  She passed the letter across the table to her son, who had led for the prosecution during the trial. He studied it, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Unusual phraseology, on the whole,” was his comment, as he returned it. Mrs. Bradley laid the missive aside, but with a tender touch. She had been called many things in her time, but had never previously been referred to as an undraped Thessalonian reconstruction. She liked the expression very much.

  “It’s inaccurate, though,” said Ferdinand, looking up suddenly from his newspaper as though she had spoken her thoughts. “There’s a reconstructed figure of a goddess from Neolithic Thessaly in terra-cotta in the National Museum in Athens. It has long, elaborately dressed hair, very broad hips, and a very long neck. It has a large nose, eyes almost on to its forehead, and tremendously bulging thighs.” He glanced at his mother. “The person who wrote the letter has seen either you or the figurine; not both.”

  He resumed his reading. His mother continued hers, and her mind was soon busy with matters quite different from anonymous letters; but that night, as she lay in bed, she thought of the letter again, and wondered which friend of the convicted murderer could have written it. Ferdinand dealt with this point, without being asked, next morning. Bone was not married, so the letter was probably from his brother, who had given evidence for the defence and had attempted to create a scene in court when the jury pronounced their verdict.

  “But who knew I had anything to do with
the case?” asked Mrs. Bradley, who had not attended the trial; her only interest in it had been that her special knowledge of the behaviour and customs of Satanists had led to the arrest of the murderer, but her name had never been mentioned in this connection—at least, not publicly.

  The case had been a sordid one, even of its kind. The dead woman, who was known to the police both in her professional capacity and as a twice-convicted thief, had been found dead in the basement of an empty house in South London, far from her home or her haunts.

  She had been identified by a number of persons, but none of these attempted to account for her having been in South London. It proved later, however, that, as she had served two sentences for theft, the police believed that she and a partner might have quarrelled over the share-out of the results of a third burglary. Only one blow, in the opinion of the doctors, had been struck by her assailant, but this blow had shattered the base of the skull.

  She lay as she had fallen, and the only clue had been a very unpleasant little object picked up on the hearth of the room in which she had been found.

  This was a toad, mummified and pinned out on a piece of wood in the shape of a cross. It was an obscene and evil thing, and was produced at the trial for examination by the jury, one of whom, a Catholic, crossed himself hastily at sight of it, and refused to touch it.

  Ferdinand, who seldom discussed his work, had told his mother of this discovery, and it had interested her sufficiently for her to suggest that the police ought to try to find out whether a certain figure (she sketched it and passed it across the table) of asymmetrical shape had been drawn on the floor of the room in which the body had lain. The figure was a pentagram within a couple of concentric circles.

  It was this mild suggestion of hers which had led to Bone’s arrest, for a young and earnest constable, anxious for—and deserving of—the promotion which he obtained in consequence of giving proof that he had a good memory and powers of intelligent observation, recollected having seen such a demoniac sign on the first floor of a building in which a rather eccentric club had been raided some time previously.

  Bone was a member of this club, and from this fact the police could prove an association with the murdered woman. The Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, having rounded up the members, broke down the alibi, which Bone tried to prove for the night of the murder, charged him, and took him into custody.

  Then one of his associates, a renegade Jew named Salstein, told the police that he “guessed Bone had been hexed.” He could not translate nor explain the word to the complete satisfaction of the police, so another member of the club was called in. His version was that “hex” was a form of hypnotism, and was used for evil purposes.

  Mrs. Bradley’s suggestion to her son, when he came to her for an exposition of the peculiar properties of “hex” and “hex-doctors,” was that “hex” constituted a poor defence in a case of murder, or, indeed, in the commission of any serious wrong-doing, since the scientific study of hypnotism had convinced her that it was not possible to cause a person under the influence of hypnosis to perform any act which that person subconsciously believed to be wrong.

  If Bone had been “hexed” it was perfectly certain that he must have had the will to commit murder. Psychologically, the point permitted no doubt.

  That there were persons known as “hex-doctors” in certain remote districts of the United States she readily admitted, and recounted stories of some of their deeds. Their power, she thought, derived partly from a knowledge of West Indian negro magic and partly from the superstitions of a population recruited largely from Central Europe, where belief in witchcraft was strong.

  At the trial it was readily shown that Bone had been a man who certainly would not have met Minnie Baum in order to share with her the proceeds of burglary, and the prosecution, led by Ferdinand, therefore took the line that he had killed the woman in order to obtain what the newspapers, in headlines, later called Sensation. The case, in America, of the dissolute and depraved youths Loeb and Leopold was recalled to the minds of the jury, in a masterly analysis, by Ferdinand, but he realised that unless he could show a more substantial motive, a conviction would be difficult to obtain.

  The defence were too shrewd—or too orthodox—to attempt to show that the accused man had been hypnotised into killing Minnie Baum. They denied murder, but pleaded Bone guilty of manslaughter. They attempted to show that a struggle had taken place, and argued that the woman had attacked the prisoner and had been killed whilst fighting with him.

  The jury’s verdict of Guilty but Insane was a surprise, Ferdinand afterwards confessed. On the evidence, he had scarcely hoped for a conviction.

  Two years passed, and at the end of them Mrs. Bradley had almost forgotten Bone’s name; but not quite. Ferdinand, visiting her again, this time with his wife and little son, happened to observe that Bone was dead.

  “Bone?” said Mrs. Bradley, searching her memory. “Oh, of course, yes. The man who went to Broadmoor. Guilty, but insane.” She grinned, mirthlessly. “All murderers are guilty but insane. Murder is an insane act. So he’s dead? How did it happen? An accident?”

  “Yes. He was a hæmophile it seems. Contrived to cut himself on a gardening implement—edge of a hoe, they say—and died because no one could stop the bleeding. Suicide, most likely. He was never allowed within miles of anything sharp, so he must have got hold of the tool without permission.”

  “Yes, they’re very careful,” said Mrs. Bradley, gazing absently at a letter beside her plate. The handwriting seemed, not familiar, but capable of stirring some chord of memory. She slit open the envelope. The postmark was Norwich, and the letter ran:

  “So Bone is dead. Well, well, well.”

  “Now, that’s what I call a threat,” said Mrs. Bradley, putting it back into its envelope. A year passed, however, and nothing came of the threat, if threat it was. Only one other curious little fact emerged. It was supplied by Ferdinand, some weeks later, when Mrs. Bradley was visiting him and his wife.

  “By the way,” he said, “queer that those Bone brothers should have died within a week of one another.”

  “Did they?” asked Mrs. Bradley, and quoted the second anonymous letter she had received, and gave the date.

  “Bone must have passed on the vendetta, then,” said Ferdinand, knitting his brows. “He died six days before the chap in Broadmoor. Where did the letter come from?”

  “Norwich,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Well, it couldn’t have come from this brother, if he wrote the other. Besides, they’re London people.”

  “The same person wrote both letters,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  • CHAPTER 2 •

  “The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!”

  “You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”

  —From Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll.

  So far as Mrs. Bradley was concerned, the threat—for threat it was—ripened with the visit of Amos Bleriot to her consulting room one Tuesday morning in about the middle of May.

  The appointment had been made over the telephone, and Mrs. Bradley had no clue whatever to the nature of her patient’s disease beyond the fact that it must be psychopathic. Needless to say, at that time she did not connect him with anonymous threats.

  She had been very busy during the early summer, but the addition of a name to her casebook was always an interesting matter, and she found herself looking forward to the visit and was pleased to find the patient punctual.

  He was shown into the consulting room at one minute past ten, and proved to be a strongly built man in the middle fifties with light eyes and a small brown beard. He wore a tweed suit and heavy boots, and his movements were sufficiently clumsy to betray that lack of co-ordination between brain and motor reflexes by which it was always possible to diagnose some degree of mental instability.

  Mrs. Bradley
invited him to sit down, and began to discuss the weather.

  “Yes, yes, doctor,” said he. “But do let us come to the point! I have to get my lunch at twelve, or I am no good for the rest of the day.”

  “Very well,” said the psychoanalyst. “State your difficulties.”

  “My first difficulty,” pronounced the patient, rubbing his nose and then irritably scratching his knee, “was to find a suitable person to consult. I went to B.…You know B…, I suppose?”

  “I know several B’s,” Mrs. Bradley responded, with a hoot of laughter, which seemed to surprise the patient.

  “I don’t care to mention names,” said he, with a glance towards the door. “At any rate, B…was of no use to me. You see, I am obsessed.”

  He rubbed his brow, licked all round his lips and appeared to be trying to catch a flea in the sleeve of his jacket. Mrs. Bradley made a note on the pad before her.

  “Obsessed. Yes?” she said encouragingly.

  “I am a poet.”

  “Really?”

  “That is—I was a poet. Now I find myself demoded, old-fashioned, out of date, a laughing-stock to my contemporaries, who have all moved forward with the times, and an anachronism to students of modern poetic thought.”

  “Yes?”

  “My imagery is that of the nineteen-twenties; my subject matter is in keeping. I belong to the Drains Era. You know my early work, no doubt? Some of it is extremely fine. Interesting even now as a survival, it will take its place in its own time. I cannot but admire it. The Ode to a Butcher’s Slab—perfect, although, as I say, completely out of date. The sonnet-sequence which begins ‘Blear blood uncoop toward ap Howell lay’—superb, but hopelessly behind the times.” He sighed heavily. “It was,” he continued sadly, “in the year 1928 that I began to suffer from arrested development. I trace it all back to a certain night in March of that year, when I dined with M.…At first I was interested, but by the summer of 1929 I had become alarmed. I changed my venue, I made new friends (although all human contacts are most disagreeable to me), I even tried keeping pets. All this had the very worst effect. To begin with, it appeared to disconcert my Muse, who not only eluded me for months at a time, but when she returned only inspired me to such post-war heresies as the lyric (praised by some, but to me complete anathema) ‘Plum, spew thy gore, bright cherry spit thy lung.’ I then went on in the manner of the earlier Georgians—”