Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley) Page 11

  Then one hundred and twenty-nine.

  If you can get all this done during the day we can argue about it after dinner.

  Gillian’s first reaction to this singular document was to moan and give up the struggle. From the time when long division of money had been, to her mind, impossible, it seemed, of comprehension, she had detested any puzzle of which integers formed the chief, or, indeed, any important part.

  Impatiently she flicked over the next page of the notebook to see whether Mrs. Bradley had made any further notes. She had. The next page was headed:

  “Let us by all means try for a biggar and

  Better house south of where culter flourishes.”

  It then went on:

  “Young Hunting kens all the fords of Clyde,

  He’ll ride them one by one;

  And though the night was ne’er so mirk,

  Young Hunting will be home.”

  Gillian sighed and shook her head. She turned over the next page, and there found:

  “Some would say thirty, or perhaps one hundred and twenty-nine.”

  Gillian stared at this, and then impatiently flicked back the pages again, but still no chord of memory, imagination or, as she herself expressed it, “ordinary gump,” was stirred by anything she read. She tried the fourth page:

  “Now there,” Mrs. Bradley had written, “is what I call the Murderer’s Vade-Mecum or Murder, not as a Fine Art, but as a Botched Job.”

  “Good Lord!” said Gillian aloud. “She said that yesterday. Apropos of what? Oh, Lord, what was it? The Murderer’s— Got it in one! A-ha! Now, then! Where’s that cipher?”

  Full of confidence, she turned to the bedside table on which the Oxford Book of Ballads had been lying. It was no longer there.

  “Oh, damn!” said Gillian, dismayed. Her mind leapt to conclusions. “That brute must have had it when he snaffled the notebook. Then he must have dropped it, because it certainly wasn’t on him. It’s too big to go into a pocket. I wonder whether, by any chance—”

  She descended. At the entrance to the lift a page was waiting. The book was under his arm.

  “Miss Macrae was thinking ye’ll be speiring after your book,” he observed as he handed it over. “It was on the gentleman that fell frae your window the now, and as it was marked with the name of the hotel, the polis gave it into our charge…Thank ye kindly. No, they didna take him up. He said he was frae the University of Cambridge, and it was a’ a joke.”

  Gillian leapt upstairs again, only to fall sprawling as a foot, which shot out from a man who was leaning over the banisters gazing into the well of the hall, caught her completely unawares. The book flew out of her hands, but a girl accustomed to “wild, rough games” was also accustomed to recovering quickly and neatly from falls. Picking herself up, she went for the man’s legs as he dashed to pick up the book. She had never brought off a rugby tackle in her life, but fortunately the man was small and light. He was, in fact, Mr. Joshua. He came down, hitting his head a sharp crack against a door, which immediately opened. Gillian stood by for a second, breathing heavily and feeling slightly dazed, the book clasped to her breast. Mr. Joshua, wiping his face, apologised to the man who had opened the door. He had slipped, he said. The man, an elderly Canadian, seemed disposed for conversation. They should not put polished linoleum in hotel corridors, he said. He drew the protesting Mr. Joshua firmly inside his room, talking, with nasal hospitality, on the subject of “a straight rye.”

  Gillian, grinning, went back to her room and locked the door.

  Mrs. Bradley’s fourth-page clue had given Gillian’s brain the fillip it needed. It referred to the last ballad they had read, which was called Young Hunting.

  There were, as Mrs. Bradley had pointed out, a great many alternatives and/or possible combinations, in the working out of the acrostic. These, however, would be subject to trial. Obvious errors would tend to eliminate themselves upon inspection, she imagined. The results could then be tested, and the correctness of the final result would be, she hoped, self-evident. Stimulated by her successful physical countering of Mr. Joshua’s villainy, she settled down with zest to elucidate the puzzle.

  The numbers, it was clear from Mrs. Bradley’s third page, referred to the numbers of the ballads in the Oxford Book.

  “And that means,” thought Gillian, “that the person who made the cypher may still be alive, or, at any rate, must have died fairly recently, because the Oxford Book was not published until 1948. That might account for this ‘house to house’ business which otherwise seems such a mystery. Well, anyhow, let’s get on.”

  Young Hunting, which was the ballad obtained by reference to Mrs. Bradley’s last page, was numbered thirty, and the number of the page on which it commenced was one hundred and twenty-nine. Once this had been established, the rest was easy going.

  By inference, the ballad numbering and not the page numbering, was the first clue, since there was no number higher than one hundred and fifty-two in the cypher, and this would restrict the number of ballads used to thirty-six, if the page numbering had been employed. There was no particular reason against this, however, she reasoned, if the acrostic could be worked out from those few ballads, but very soon she realised that it could not, for the cypher was, in its first stages, very simple.

  The title The Queen’s Marie, on which, in view of the plan of Edinburgh they had found, and the obvious references on it to Marie Hamilton’s execution, she set to work, mindful also of their apparently abortive pilgrimage to Stirling, did not work out at all from Mrs. Bradley’s figures, but as soon as she tried the name Marie Hamilton she knew she was on the right track.

  The titles of the ballads, as worked out by Mrs. Bradley, ran thus:

  Alternatives were: (This list can be omitted by bored or lazy readers. It has academic interest only.)

  For letter A

  A Lyke-Wake Dirge

  Annan Water

  Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough and William of Cloudesley

  A Little Geste of Robin Hood and His Meiny

  Archie of Cawfield

  For letter E

  Erlington

  Earl Brand

  Edward, Edward

  Edom o’Gordon

  For letter H

  Hynd Etin

  Hugh of Lincoln

  Hobbie Noble

  Hughie the Graeme

  Helen of Kirconnell

  For letter L

  Lord Ingram and Childe Vyet

  Lord Thomas and Fair Annet

  Leesome Brand

  Lord Randall

  Lady Maisry

  Lamkin

  Lady Elspat

  Lord Maxwell’s Last Good Night

  For letter T

  Tam Lin

  The Douglas Tragedy

  This last ballad had been selected from some dozens, all beginning with the word The, but, as Mrs. Bradley had pointed out, there was reason for the selection, in that the name Douglas constituted, in itself, some sort of possible pointer, owing to the context formed by the location (as Americans might say) of the mystery.

  Gillian sat back, and tapped on the table with her pencil. “First catch your fish and then cook it” pretty well expressed her state of mind. She put down the pencil and commenced to read the chosen ballads carefully. Where she hit upon a stanza which seemed to have some bearing upon wealth or treasure (the obvious motive for murder, in her opinion) or upon lines which seemed to give a hint of the situation of the so-far undiscovered house, she noted it.

  It became a fascinating game, and she was surprised when she heard the gong for luncheon. She wondered where best to hide the book of ballads and Mrs. Bradley’s notes, and hit upon the plan of leaving them, as though by accident, in the ground-floor ladies’ lavatory. She was a confirmed cinema-addict, and had often seen this device used upon the screen to foil the machinations of men. It was not, perhaps, the perfect repository, in some senses, but she thought that its advantages, in the present instance, outweighed any
nice objections. So she unlocked her door, felt for her little gun, and shot into the lift, which fortunately opened to let out a resident who had been down to the dining room already, but had returned to get her spectacles because the fish was not filleted that day.

  The lift descended; Gillian shot out, and darted for the sanctuary she had decided upon for the documents. She put them down on a glass shelf above one of the washing basins, entered one of the compartments, came out, and said to the attendant-maid:

  “I say, can I leave them? I don’t really want to be bothered with them at lunch. There’s so little room at my table.”

  With an easy mind she washed, powdered her nose, and added, as she reached the swing door:

  “Please don’t give them to anyone else; all sorts of sharks in this hotel are wanting to read that book, and I’m not ready yet to return it to the library.”

  The Scottish maid smiled, put a small pile of clean towels on top of the book and the notebook, and then said (for, like most Scottish maids, she was the soul of democratic friendliness):

  “I’ll see ye get them.”

  Gillian enjoyed her lunch. When it was over she watched her chance, retrieved her property, returned safely to her room, locked the door again, and then reread Mrs. Bradley’s notes. She remembered that there was a page she had not tested; a page whose odd spelling intrigued her. She took up the house-telephone. She knew that she was being a nuisance, but she did not much want to walk about the hotel, in view of her promise to Mrs. Bradley.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you again about books,” she said, “but is there an atlas in the library?”

  The page who had given her the book of ballads after it had been taken from Mr. Geoffrey, brought her the atlas.

  Biggar was marked; so was Culter.

  “So what?” thought Gillian, longing for George and the car. At that moment the telephone rang.

  • CHAPTER 7 •

  “The lady ran up to her Tower-head,

  So fast as she could hie,

  To see if by her fair speeches

  She could with him agree.”

  Having entirely missed—albeit by a minute or two only—Mr. Geoffrey’s unceremonious descent from the window-sill, George and Mrs. Bradley drove sedately out of Edinburgh along the road to Peebles. From Peebles they followed the Tweed, cut off a loop of it between Melrose and Dryburgh, continued along it to Kelso, and then, by a long road avoiding the hill, came to Wooler. From here it was south and a little by east for Morpeth, and then almost due south to Newcastle.

  “An enjoyable run, George,” said his employer. “We shall go back after dinner, unless the police detain me.”

  “Very good, madam,” said George.

  “And this time,” said Mrs. Bradley, “we have not been followed, have we?”

  “Not to my knowledge, madam, no.”

  “Ah. I trust your knowledge, George. Besides, I expect our friends are busy trying to steal her books and things from Miss Gillian.”

  George, whose sense of chivalry had been outraged at leaving Gillian alone in Edinburgh, did not reply to this statement of opinion. Mrs. Bradley cackled, and then added:

  “Miss Gillian will give as good as she gets, George, never fear.”

  George parked the car at a garage almost next door to the police station before which he had stopped. Mrs. Bradley went in and asked for the inspector.

  “It’s like this, ma’am,” said the inspector, after he had asked whether Mrs. Bradley had lunched. “We’ve got another line on that young suicide lad.”

  “The lad who was murdered, you mean?” said Mrs. Bradley. She pulled off her gloves, avoiding the inspector’s surprised and reproachful eye.

  “And how did you get on to that?” the inspector enquired. Mrs. Bradley cackled, and observed that sometimes the right hand did not know what the left hand accomplished.

  “Tell me all, child,” she added.

  “Well, I’ll admit he was murdered. But, first, to who he is. His previous employer wrote to us; said he understood the lad hadna been identified, but that from the description he believed he might be able to place him for us. Sure enough, too, he did.

  “A dominie he was—the employer. Runs a wee school for delicate and backwards laddies. Hochen!” said the inspector, with an unreproducible snort of blended irony, irritation, and amusement.

  “Where, child?”

  “At a place in Lincolnshire. I dinna believe it matters, but I have the address, and I’ll give it you. Well, this man gave our lad the sack. He came in drunk from his half-day out once or twice, and he tawsed one of the wee laddies, which, it seems, was against the rules of the school, and he was untidy in his clothes and didna wash himself overmuch, and a two-three things a schoolmaster-body should frown on.”

  “So the headmaster frowned on them for him, and turned him out?”

  “That’s about it. Well, the lad had expectations from his grandfather, and on his birthday—that was about a week before the old dominie—not that old, you ken, but older by twenty years than the laddie—showed him the gate—he was in a great state of excitement showing off to the others a letter he had had from his grandpa, promising him all he could find at the time of the old man’s death.

  “ ‘And I ken where it is, all of it,’ he says. ‘Every piece. Find it?’ he says. ‘It takes no finding,’ he says, ‘for I ken where every bit is.’ Now, what can you make of all that?”

  “Quite a lot,” said Mrs. Bradley dryly. “What happened when he lost his job?”

  “I dinna ken. That’s as much as the dominie could say. But he identified a two-three things we were able to show him, and he described the lad, and there’s not much doubt they’re the same. Graeme his name was, and that’s gospel, because the dominie had seen his birth certificate.”

  “And the headmaster was above suspicion?”

  The inspector chuckled.

  “We sorted him. Aye, he was above suspicion, the wee scantling.”

  “Where did the grandfather live?”

  “Eh, that had us beat. I speired at the dominie about that, but he couldna tell me any more.”

  “Well, that’s something anyway. I knew that no one but a schoolmaster or schoolmistress could have got on to a Piers Plowman history book plus a copy of the Oxford Book of Ballads. But what do you make of the fact that the dead man had been indulging (let us say) in a good deal of manual labour before he died?”

  “What are you talking about now?”

  “Nothing much, child. What about the murder?”

  “Aye,” said the inspector, with great good humour. “What about the murder! Well, I’ll tell ye. Ye’ll call to mind yon wee knife he was stabbed with? And no fingerprints on it, and the corpse in gloves? Well, one glove, anyway. Well, now, here’s something to make you laugh.” He paused, so that she could savour to the full the point of the story. Mrs. Bradley attempted to look eager, attentive, and impressed, and apparently succeeded, for, after a short pause, the inspector continued, with relish:

  “Dod, aye! You’ll mind that the wee knife was up to the hilt in the wound?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that there was blood?”

  “Yes.”

  “There wasna a drop of blood on the glove at all.”

  “That isn’t proof positive of murder,” said Mrs. Bradley, “and—” she hesitated delicately, “I had noticed it.”

  “It isna proof positive; it’s what you might call, if you’d a mind, though, truth presumptive,” said the inspector. “But, to clinch it, what do you think we found?”

  Mrs. Bradley could not bear to ruin the dramatic effect of this question, and so she did not make the obvious reply.

  “Anither pair of gloves!” said the inspector, almost dancing with pleasure. “Aye, ma’am! Anither pair of gloves, in his pocket! Wash-leather, yellow, gey old, and one of the fingers bitten through on each, where he pulled them off with his teeth. And not a mark on the ones he had on! Not a single mar
k! Will you add that up, ma’am, and see what you make it come to?”

  “Yes, it might be,” said Mrs. Bradley, speaking doubtfully. “Anyway, what about it?”

  “Well, we traced Graemes here and Graemes there—’tis a good Border name, you ken—but we couldna trace the rich grandpa. All the same, we found a cousin; or, rather, we found a cousin’s cousin, a lassie. Her name was Graeme, too. She put us on to the grandpa. He lives in East Anglia, it seems—”

  “I like the lassie,” said Mrs. Bradley, grinning. “But, the grandfather’s house is at a point where a line drawn from Edinburgh—or let us say, Leith—to Port Patrick, or perhaps Stranraer, intersects with a line drawn from Lochgilphead to Peel Fell. Have you a map on a conical projection with two standard parallels? If so, I can show you what I mean.”

  “I ken well enough what you mean,” said the inspector. “I learned my map of Scotland as school! Yon wee point you’re making will be on the upper Clyde, not far from Lanark, I’m thinking. Woman, you’re an old witch! How did you get on to that now? And what does it mean?”

  “I have my methods,” said Mrs. Bradley, grinning. “But you need other bearings before you can find the treasure. That young man got himself sacked from his school to avert suspicion, I think. There are family ramifications, Inspector, I think. He had worked out his grandfather’s rather childish will, and did not want to wait until the old man died before he plundered the family hoard.”

  “You’re beyond me,” said the inspector.

  “So was the arrow beyond Jonathan,” Mrs. Bradley reminded him, “but it was not for Jonathan’s safety that that was so.”

  The inspector looked at her searchingly, but her brilliant eyes told him nothing. He merely remarked,

  “Ye maun hae been a sonsie lassie.”

  Mrs. Bradley, grinning her acknowledgment of a compliment, which had not been paid her for nearly forty years, enquired in a business-like tone:

  “And what have you brought me down here for? You could have telephoned all this.”

  “Well,” said the inspector, glancing cautiously about him, “I’ll first say this, and no more: we’ve had a message from somebody else, you ken. We’ve had a nod and a wink from Scotland Yard, about ye, and I don’t mind telling ye—although it’s no an intercounty match”—he chuckled hoarsely—“there’s folks that were at public school with your son, and you ken, better than I ken, where that can lead an English body, do you not?”