Hangman's Curfew (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)

  Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (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)

  Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (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)

  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 1941

  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 2013

  www.apub.com

  First published Great Britain in 1941 by Michael Joseph

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

  E-ISBN: 9781477868829

  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.

  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

  About the Author

  • CHAPTER 1 •

  “And pleasant is the fairy land

  For those that in it dwell,

  But ay at end of seven years

  They pay a teind to hell.”

  There are many ways of coping with one’s broken heart. The usual alternatives—good works and going to the devil, the latter journey involving a loveless marriage to a financier, preferably fat—had been considered hastily by Gillian before she followed the more reasonable course of going to visit her grandmother’s friend, Mrs. Bradley.

  Mrs. Bradley, grinning snake-like upon the guest, paid the broken heart sympathetic tribute. She ordered the patient a week’s complete rest, the latest books to read, and a Chinese Jacket of surpassing beauty to wear during the all-too-short and charmingly interesting mornings. These were spent in her room. The cure included the most luxurious food, and, on the fifteenth day, when convalescence appeared to be imminent, a visit from a very expensive hairdresser. Mrs. Bradley herself kept out of the invalid’s way for almost the whole of the fortnight. This was partly for the invalid’s sake, but largely for her own.

  “And now, child,” she said, when the hairdresser had come and gone, “what you really need is a holiday.”

  “Oh, heavens, Aunt Adele!” said the sufferer, speaking reproachfully, turning away from the mirror, and losing immediately the air of seraphic pleasure with which she had been contemplating the new coiffure. “What on earth kind of holiday could I enjoy now?”

  “Well, you could borrow the car,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And George to drive it,” she added heroically.

  Gillian, who had begun to cry, looked up, blinked back the more obtrusive of the tears, and squeezed Mrs. Bradley’s arm affectionately.

  “George wouldn’t come. He’d never let you be driven by another chauffeur. I can have Cynthia’s sports while she’s away. She said I could. Have you got an Ordnance map or two? Oh, and I can send to Lesley. She hikes. She’s got wads of maps.”

  The hotel in York overlooked a little river. At the bottom of the road was the Minster. London, Gerald, the disastrous love-affair, and its unhappy ending, all seemed to Gillian very far away. It is a humiliating fact that at nineteen the keenest sorrows have a habit of yielding, with uncanny readiness, to the soothing effects of excitement and a change of scene. It is a sound instinct, after all, which takes the rejected lover to the wilds to shoot hippopotami and lions. Even the female of the species—not of hippopotami and lions—can obtain a considerable amount of balm from driving along the Great North Road at eighty miles an hour.

  Gillian had no intention of taking a motoring holiday, however. She proposed to make her headquarters at Newcastle, and walk the length of the Roman Wall to Carlisle. Then she was going to cross into Galloway. She would end, she thought, by making a pilgrimage of the Scot country.

  Newcastle was a pleasanter town than she had supposed it would be. She enjoyed exploring its streets, spent an hour in the Cathedral, admired
the Norman gate and the modern bridge, and saw all that was to be seen of the city walls.

  The next day she walked on the Town Moor, met a freeman who had the privilege of grazing two cows there, and was invited to a dance, but refused the invitation. After all, she had to remind herself, it was less than three weeks since she and Gerald (she had cried in bed on the previous night because the hotel orchestra had played his favourite waltz tune) had been dancing at a Thames-side hotel, carefree, and (she had supposed at the time) in love.

  The next day the weather was fine, but not warm, and a strong wind was blowing from the south-west. They told her at the hotel that she would find it cold at Hexham and, when she had seen the Abbey, to continue by car, following the course of the river, to Chollerton or Humshaugh. That would be better than walking, they said, on such a day. They added that later it would rain.

  Gillian was set on her walk. She disregarded most of the advice, but drove out of Newcastle at about half-past eight, after an early breakfast, and decided that she would cruise about for a spot which should combine the dual advantages of offering a parking place for the car and a good beginning for a walk.

  The wind was cold and very strong. After three-quarters of an hour she began to wish she had accepted the advice of those who obviously knew more about the weather conditions of Northumberland than she did.

  In the end, when she had become very chilly indeed, and the prospect of getting out of the car seemed less inviting than she ever remembered it to have done, she decided that a short brisk walk to a castle which was marked on the Ordnance map as being about a mile and a half from where she was, would be quite sufficient exercise for such a day, and that when she had seen it and had walked back to the car honour would have been fully satisfied and she could return to the hotel for lunch.

  She had breakfasted well, but even at that hour—it was then barely ten o’clock—lunch seemed to beckon like a beacon. In fact it was disgusting and humiliating, she found, that food should offer such solace, when her first impression had been that she would probably sink into a decline, in the Victorian manner, and gradually fade away to a flower-decked grave.

  She ran the car up a short steep unmade road on to the open moor, left it with its left wheels almost in a gully, and then took a winding pathway, too narrow to be called a road—although it might have been possible to negotiate it in a very small car—in a south-westerly direction across the moor.

  It was grand to be out in the bitter air, for the deadly cold was, at first, intensely exhilarating, and Gillian young, strong, and athletic.

  She leaned forward into the wind and fought her way, enjoying the battle, but comforted, all the same, by the thought that she could end it at any moment she chose, turn her back on the wind, make for home (in her case the hotel) and a good and satisfying lunch. Her interest in food, she had been pensively interested to discover, was not in the least affected by her sorrows.

  The road she had chosen followed the course of a burn. Two miles on she came to crossroads, consulted her map, and elected to take the southward branch of the fork, which led to a castle.

  Except for the road itself, she might have been in a part of the world uncharted, unheeded, and unknown. There was nothing but the wind and the heather, the narrow road, and, occasionally, a hovering bird.

  She stepped along briskly, still finding the wind very cold. Suddenly she heard, behind her, the sound of footsteps, a confident, masculine stride, on the hard, bare path. She could not forbear to glance behind her. Not more than thirty yards in the rear was a young man in shorts and a lumber-jacket. He carried an ashplant with which he was whacking at the heather.

  Gillian’s heart sank. Had she not already come so far along the road, she could have found it in her mind to turn back. The last thing she wanted was company, particularly the company of one who was so obviously, like herself, on holiday. The shorts, the lumber-jacket, the ashplant, the pipe (she had seen it, and the slight whiffs of smoke which the wind soon blew away) all filled her with quick irritation. A shepherd, a trapper, gipsies—these would have been, not welcome, but, at least, part of the countryside. The young man on holiday was nothing but an eyesore and a nuisance, particularly considering the circumstances, which brought her on this kind of holiday.

  She judged, however, that, with a slight quickening of her pace, she could be well away from him in less than a quarter of a mile. She hastened forward, to make sure of leaving him quickly. The young man, however, quickened, too. He was thin and long-limbed. On he came, but he took not the slightest notice of her as he passed her. She might have been a ghost, or the wind whistling by; nothing more.

  “That’s all right, then,” she thought. “He feels as unsociable as I do.” She found that, all the same, she was not too pleased about this, and stared at his thin back resentfully.

  On either side the moors stretched, restful and pleasing, to where, further on, the land rose to heights of about twelve hundred feet; from this again rose hills, another six hundred feet. The burns ran fast, in deep clefts like tiny gorges, and although the streams were narrow, they were treacherous, with deep holes—pot-holes—in the middle, and sudden depths under the banks.

  Still following the road, she gained her first sight of the castle, which she had decided to make her objective. It was small, square, bold, and lonely. She liked the look of it, saw that the young man had passed it by, made for it eagerly, explored it cautiously, and discovered that it was possible to mount to the second floor. To look down from the battlements at this height made her feel slightly giddy, so she sat with her back against the wall, and her feet stretched out towards the interior of the keep, out of the way of the wind. She would have a short rest, she decided, and smoke a cigarette. Twenty minutes she would allow herself, she thought, before she climbed down, and returned, across the moor, for the car.

  It was pleasant to get some shelter from the wind. It was pleasant to be alone and to indulge a fit of pleasant melancholy. Her thoughts began to dwell upon her sorrows, and upon the uselessness of further existence, and she was deep in the well of self-pity when the beating of the heavy rain upon her retreat caused her to scramble hastily down the staircase and into the ancient guardroom on the ground floor. She wondered how long the rain would last. It was a long way back to the car, and she would be soaked before she got there, unless the heavy shower was over soon.

  There was only one corner of the guardroom which was weatherproof, she discovered, but by hugging her feet close under her she found that the rain, as it dripped through the ruined roof, could not reach her. She was congratulating herself upon this fact when she remembered the solitary young man. He must be wet through, she surmised. There had been no shelter, other than the castle, so far as she could remember from the map, for several miles.

  She began to feel sorry for the wayfarer. He had had, with his black hair, tall, thin, tough-looking body, brown hands—details which she had noticed as he had passed her—something the look of her elder brother, of whom she was very fond. Then, with a scowl, she remembered that this brother had told her abruptly, with no warning, no self-deprecatory, half-apologetic introduction—in fact with the most distressing and uncalled-for lack of tact—that her Gerald was a snob, a rotter, and a cadger—in that order—and that the sooner she gave him up the better it would be for her and for the rest of the family, none of whom had the slightest desire to see her married to a snob, a rotter, a cadger, or (added her brother harshly), a dirty little double-crossing half-Italian. Most unfortunately, this arrière-pensée on the part of her brother proved to be justified by the facts, for, although he had written what her best friend, to whom she showed it, called a perfectly lovely letter, Gerald certainly had double-crossed to the extent that, actually, he had been the one to do the giving up—a fact which she had kept from her family. Nevertheless it remained that she had been jilted and her brother right.

  Her thoughts had reached this morbid, indisputable conclusion when she heard sounds. In
a few moments there appeared before her the young man who had passed her on the moor. Upon seeing her, he pulled up. Gillian did not want company, but common humanity caused her to exclaim, in kindly tones of encouragement:

  “Oh, do sit down. This is the only sheltered spot for miles around.”

  The young man bowed, and sat down. His face was long and melancholy, but he was not ill-looking.

  “Thanks very much. The wind’s pretty strong, isn’t it?” he said. He paused. “And now this damnable rain,” he added, smiling. His smile was not good. It made him look crafty, Gillian thought

  “Yes, I shan’t be sorry to turn my back on the wind going back, that’s one thing,” she agreed.

  “I shouldn’t be sorry to turn my back on my life,” said the young man violently. This remark accorded so perfectly with what Gillian supposed her own views on the future to be, that a feeling of warm understanding took the place of her first desire to be left alone in her solitude. The young man sat with his back against the ancient stones of the keep and his long legs tucked away under him, and produced his pipe, tobacco, and matches.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  For some minutes after this they sat in silence. Gillian waited for a confidence, which she felt was in the air, and smoked her cigarette in the reprehensible way in which young women usually perform this action, and the young man lit his pipe and smoked it sombrely. Sure enough, in about five minutes the expected confidence came, but when she had heard it she wondered whether she had done well to attempt to invoke it, for the young man’s story was a strange one. It took him the best part of an hour and a half to tell it, and Gillian was frozen to the bone, and the rain had ceased, long before he had finished. She did not like to interrupt him, however, and the narrative, although on the whole, incredible, was interesting and unusual.

  “Bewley, then, is not a North-country man?” was Gillian’s first remark at the conclusion of the tale, which the young man had told with a spirit and an abundance of detail, which she found it impossible to reproduce afterwards for Mrs. Bradley’s benefit. Taking his pipe from his pocket and staring at the bowl, the young man agreed that Bewley was not a North-country man.