Here Comes a Chopper Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Gladys Mitchell

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A MRS BRADLEY MYSTERY

  When a pair of ramblers, lost in the English countryside, stop at a country house to ask for directions, they are most astonished to be ushered in to dinner. It seems they’ve been invited as a necessity by the superstitious lady of the house, to avoid thirteen guests sitting down to dinner. But the thirteenth guest never arrives, and his headless body is discovered in a wood the next day.

  Fortunately, numbered among the original dinner guests is a rather extraordinary psychoanalyst, and amateur detective, by the name of Mrs Bradley...

  About the Author

  Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell – or ‘The Great Gladys’ as Philip Larkin called her – was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and attributed her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson.

  Her first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the heroine of a further sixty-six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club, alongside Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers. In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.

  ALSO BY GLADYS MITCHELL

  Speedy Death

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop

  The Longer Bodies

  The Saltmarsh Murders

  Death at the Opera

  The Devil at Saxon Wall

  Dead Men’s Morris

  Come Away, Death

  St Peter’s Finger

  Printer’s Error

  Brazen Tongue

  Hangman’s Curfew

  When Last I Died

  Laurels Are Poison

  The Worsted Viper

  Sunset Over Soho

  My Father Sleeps

  The Rising of the Moon

  Death and the Maiden

  Tom Brown’s Body

  Groaning Spinney

  The Devil’s Elbow

  The Echoing Strangers

  Merlin’s Furlong

  Watson’s Choice

  Faintley Speaking

  Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose

  The Twenty-Third Man

  Spotted Hemlock

  The Man Who Grew Tomatoes

  Say It With Flowers

  The Nodding Canaries

  My Bones Will Keep

  Adders on the Heath

  Death of a Delft Blue

  Pageant of Murder

  The Croaking Raven

  Skeleton Island

  Three Quick and Five Dead

  Dance to Your Daddy

  Gory Dew

  Lament for Leto

  A Hearse on May-Day

  The Murder of Busy Lizzie

  Winking at the Brim

  A Javelin for Jonah

  Convent on Styx

  Late, Late in the Evening

  Noonday and Night

  Fault in the Structure

  Wraiths and Changelings

  Mingled With Venom

  The Mudflats of the Dead

  Nest of Vipers

  Uncoffin’d Clay

  The Whispering Knights

  Lovers, Make Moan

  The Death-Cap Dancers

  The Death of a Burrowing Mole

  Here Lies Gloria Mundy

  Cold, Lone and Still

  The Greenstone Griffins

  The Crozier Pharaohs

  No Winding-Sheet

  To

  DOROTHY ALLEN

  ‘As goddess Isis when she went

  Or glided through the street,

  Made all that touched her, with her scent,

  And whom she touched, turn sweet.’

  ROBERT HERRICK, A Song to the Maskers

  GLADYS MITCHELL

  Here Comes a

  Chopper

  ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

  Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.’

  Chapter One

  ‘And in the wood, where often you and I

  Upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie,

  Emptying our bosoms of their counsels sweet,

  There my Lysander and myself shall meet,

  And thence from Athens turn away our eyes

  To seek new friends and stranger companies.’

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  ROGER SHAVED BEFORE a mirror which was set, he always thought, in the darkest and most inconvenient corner of the bathroom, and then, in his bedroom, examined the result. It would do for old Bob, he decided. He explored his long lean jaw with a long, lean hand, finished dressing, disregarded his landlady’s summons to the early breakfast he had asked for, and checked his holiday luggage.

  Mackintosh, spare shoes and socks, shaving tackle, hairbrush, toothbrush, comb, pyjamas, spare shirt, shorts, handkerchief, chocolate, tobacco, second pipe, unopened box of fifty cigarettes, John Donne, the Eagle and the Dove, the Hesperides, the Woman on the Beast. He regarded his possessions with pride and added to them a couple of boxes of matches—he already had a lighter in his pocket—and a small compass.

  He breakfasted—kippers, thick bread and butter, strong tea and two cigarettes—packed his modest but satisfactory kit in the rucksack in which it would be carried, added an Ordnance map and an extra sweater, called good-bye to his landlady and set out.

  It occurred to him, before he had gone a hundred yards, that he had left his ashplant in the umbrella stand in the hall. He went back for it, and surprised his landlady, who was kneeling on the mat just inside the front door polishing out the marks left by his hiking shoes on her linoleum, by opening the front door almost on to her face. He apologized, seized the stick, glanced at his wristwatch, and began to run down the road.

  The bus was on time, and he caught it. As it was an hourly service, be thought he might congratulate himself on this achievement. He was superstitious about it, however, for it was within his experience that if matters went too well at the beginning they were apt to fall short towards the end. All the same, he felt glad he had returned for the ashplant. It was a trusted friend, and he would have missed it on the kind of holiday which he and Bob had planned.

  Roger enjoyed riding on buses. This one was a single-decker. He contrived to get the back seat, and there was able to enjoy his first pipe of the day. The route lay along a country road, and he was almost sorry when it was time to get out. There were few people travelling his way, for it was the Thursday before Good Friday, and most people had not begun their Easter holiday. It was not, in any case, a very promising day, and he was glad he had brought the mackintosh, a neat roll at the top of the rucksack.

  He paid his fare, leaned
back, and, at the end of an hour, looked out for Bob as they approached the bus stop, but Bob was not to be seen. This was somewhat surprising, for Bob was always first, and Roger had grown to expect that this would continue. He hitched the rucksack on to his shoulders—he had taken it off to sit down—knocked out his pipe and refilled it, then set down the ferrule of his ashplant and rose to his feet to get out. Waiting at the bus stop was a girl. She barred his way.

  ‘Don’t get out if you’re Roger Hoskyn,’ she said. ‘Get in again. I’ve come about Bob.’ She spoke quietly and with pleasant friendliness, and, Roger retreating before her, she took a seat in the bus. ‘Are you Roger Hoskyn?’ she continued. ‘I’m sorry, but Bob can’t come. He sprained his ankle when he fell over the cat last night. It was too late to let you know, so I promised I’d meet you and tell you.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Roger blankly, removing his pipe. He was sorry for Bob, but sorrier still for himself. The holiday plans were finished. So much was clear.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ the girl said again. ‘He would have let you know, but we couldn’t get you on the ’phone.’

  The bus changed its driver and conductor. This took some little time.

  ‘No, my digs are not on the ’phone, worse luck,’ said Roger. ‘Oh, Lord! What a mess it all is!’ He stared gloomily out of the window.

  ‘He said you’d be annoyed,’ said the girl. ‘But we couldn’t think of anything to do.’

  It occurred to Roger that the girl—she could not be more than about nineteen, he thought—had put herself to considerable trouble to come and bring him the news. He felt much ashamed of his reactions.

  ‘Poor old Bob!’ he said, turning towards her and smiling. ‘After all, it’s worse for him than it is for me. I say, it was awfully good of you to come. Couldn’t we have lunch or something?’

  The girl appeared to regard this offer doubtfully; so much so that Roger was piqued.

  ‘I shan’t eat you for lunch,’ he said.

  ‘It isn’t that,’ said the girl. ‘But I have to be rather careful where I go.’

  ‘Oh? On a diet or something?’

  ‘No. A dream.’

  The conductor rang the bell. Roger said:

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ The bus was rather noisy and he did not think he could have heard her.

  ‘I expect it’s silly, and I don’t suppose you believe in such things,’ said the girl who, although Roger had been very slow to notice it, was most becomingly dressed and was also delightfully pretty. ‘I had a dream last night about a plane crash. It was horrible, and it’s left me with the feeling that something awful will happen today.’

  ‘Well, it’s happened. Old Bob sprained his ankle.’

  ‘That was last night, and doesn’t count.’

  ‘It counts to me all right.’

  ‘Yes, I know. He’s most frightfully disappointed, and I expect you are, too. It’s too rotten!’

  ‘Well, I’m not feeling so bad as I thought I should,’ said Roger, beginning to deplore his flannel trousers and old tweed jacket, and the fact that his shaving had been very far from perfect. ‘Look here, why not sit on this side?’

  They had been talking across the bus. He moved out, gave her the inside seat, slung his rucksack on to the place she had just vacated, and transferred various bulges in the shape of a tin of tobacco, a small electric torch and a stiff-covered notebook from the pockets next to the girl to the pockets next to the gangway, and settled down again.

  ‘There! That’s better,’ he said. He looked at the conductress to invite her to come for the fares. ‘Where shall we go from here? I was going to get out where I met you.’

  ‘I don’t mind a bit,’ said the girl.

  ‘If I was you,’ said the conductress, regarding them sentimentally, for she was married and liked to do her best for those who had not yet achieved the blessed state, ‘I should get orf at Rowberry Corner. There’s nice walks from there, so they tell me.’ She clipped the tickets without awaiting instructions, and handed Roger his change. ‘From the Cow and Horses, wasn’t it? Two fives.’

  She retired to the front of the bus and indulged in her own thoughts, which included the shrewd surmise that Roger would not be everybody’s choice, but that she supposed girls knew their own business best. ‘Bit of a weary willie,’ was her verdict, for, like other unobservant and ignorant persons, she was inclined, from the young man’s aesthetic air, untidy appearance, pallor and apparent thinness to underestimate his physique and his mental qualities. ‘One of them artists, most like.’

  Roger, accustomed to a certain amount of homage from his circle, never dreamed of these disparaging opinions.

  ‘Talking of superstitions,’ he began.

  ‘Oh, you must think I’m mad,’ said the girl quickly.

  ‘On the contrary, I think you’re pretty marvellous. Do you know——?’ He recounted the tiny incident of the ashplant and mentioned that he had caught the bus they were on by the skin of his teeth. ‘And that alone was enough to warn me that something would happen,’ he said. ‘Still——’ he looked at her and smiled—‘I don’t mind now about old Bob, although I’m awfully sorry he’s done in his foot. He always was an old idiot.’

  ‘And did you feel,’ asked the girl, ‘when once you’d remembered the ashplant, that you’d got to go back for it, whether you wanted to or not?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I did. It would have worried me to death not to go. But fancy your understanding that! It’s really rather extraordinary. We must be co-efficients, or soul-mates, or something don’t you think?’

  ‘I think,’ said the girl, who had been thought a soul-mate before and knew what it led to, ‘that when we get out of this bus we ought to walk miles and miles. It’s just the day for it, as long as it doesn’t rain. Couldn’t we get on to the route that you and Bob were going to take? Then you could go on tomorrow, just as you’d planned, and this evening I could go back by train.’

  ‘But Bob and I had planned twenty miles a day.’

  ‘Well, I can walk twenty miles.’

  ‘Oh, rot! And, if you could, I shouldn’t let you! Whatever next!’

  ‘All right. I’ll go home after lunch.’

  This was not to Roger’s taste either.

  ‘All right. We’ll see,’ he said. The girl laughed, and he changed the subject clumsily. ‘Bob always mentioned a kid sister—named Dorothy, by the way. I’d thought of someone not more than twelve or thirteen.’

  ‘I was twenty-one last August.’

  ‘Well, I should hardly have thought that, you know. And I’m considered a pretty good judge. I’d have said not more than nineteen. I say, I wish I’d known about the birthday.’

  ‘We had quite a good party, but Bob said he didn’t think you’d come, so we didn’t invite you.’

  ‘Well, I’m damned!’

  The conductress looked round disapprovingly. She did not have ‘language’ on her bus.

  ‘Rowberry Corner. And not too soon,’ she said. Roger hitched his rucksack over one arm and helped Dorothy out. The country road was firm beneath their feet, the sky, which had been cloudy, began to look brighter, they were both very young and it was spring.

  ‘This is quite good,’ said Roger. They tramped lightheartedly along, and stride for stride, until Roger looked at his watch. It was past midday. The bus ride had been a fairly long one.

  ‘Grub,’ he said. ‘I wonder where there’s a place?’

  They came to an inn, a startlingly decorated roadhouse. ‘Looks pretty foul, doesn’t it?’ he added. ‘Here’s hoping, anyway.’ He entered.

  ‘Lunch?’ said the blonde behind the counter. ‘Only for regulars, dearie.’

  ‘But you can give us something, surely?’ suggested Roger.

  ‘Sandwich and a glass of beer. No lunches except for regulars,’ repeated the lady, diverting her attention from the hungry to the thirsty, and pulling half a pint of mild and bitter for a yeoman in loud checks. This man drained away the fluid, wiped his mouth on the
back of his hand, looked at the foam-rimmed glass, pushed it towards the blonde, and then volunteered information.

  ‘Might do you something at the Crown, mate.’

  ‘The Crown? Where’s that?’ enquired Roger. The blonde condescended to reply. Lifting a shapely arm, she indicated the middle pane of the window of the saloon bar, and briefly replied:

  ‘Over there.’

  ‘What about it?’ asked Roger, turning his head. ‘Shall we have a drink here, and go on?’

  ‘Can’t serve anybody under eighteen,’ said the blonde, gazing with deep suspicion at Roger’s companion.

  ‘Who’s asking you to?’ asked Roger, irritated.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Dorothy, soothing him. ‘The Crown will be very much better.’

  They did not find the Crown. Opposite the roadhouse was a turning along which they walked for about a couple of miles. It ended at last in an open grassy space and a clump of trees.

  ‘The village green,’ said Dorothy, pausing to watch some ducks which were splashing across a small brook.

  ‘Can’t be. No pub, no church, no cricket pitch, no war memorial,’ said Roger sapiently. ‘I say, this is a bit thick! Do you think we’ve come the way they meant?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. Let’s go on a bit, and see what happens.’

  ‘Let’s take this turning to the left, then. It ought to bring us back on to our road, and then I suppose we had better ask again, unless in the meantime we come to something else that can do us a meal.’

  They took the turning, but it seemed to wind deeper into what has been rightly called the rural heart of England. It showed them hazel and willow, the first green of the alder, quickening twigs in the hedges and the bright lesser celandine beneath. There were streams, some with early cresses, and above the streams were the first deep pink of the apple, the already full blossom of the pear, some half-grown lambs in the fields, the brilliant leaf-buds of hawthorn and the wide-open flowers of the elm; there were birds and the sleeping oak trees, the long, strange catkins of the poplar and everywhere the grass springing green.

  But the beauties of earth and sky do not fill the void reserved in the human frame for beef and beer, and Roger began to suffer the pangs of bitter frustration and regret as well as of hunger.