Cold, Lone and Still (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

  “What were you doing when you discovered the body?”

  “I was going along to have a cigarette.”

  “Were you acquainted with the layout of the premises?”

  “No, I had never been there before.”

  “What made you go down an unlighted passage?”

  “Just chance, I suppose. I was looking for a way out to the open air.”

  “And in the passage you stumbled over the body?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I struck a match and saw that it was Carbridge.”

  “I will take you back to the previous answer. You say you were not familiar with the premises?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yet you chose to go blundering down a totally unlighted passage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? You might have encountered any number of obstacles. You could see nothing in the darkness, could you?”

  “No, or I should not have stumbled over the body.”

  “Quite so. So why did you choose to go down the passage?”

  I had done what I could to keep Bull’s name out of my answers, but it was clear that the solicitor knew the truth and was determined to get it out of me. I capitulated, for my own sake. I did not see the fun of being charged as Bull’s accessory through being obstructive.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I was following directions given me.”

  “By whom?”

  “By Bull. I ought to say that he gave them with the kindest intentions. He thought I wanted to be directed to the men’s cloakroom, which I now know is at the end of the passage.”

  That was about the lot, so far as I was concerned. There were questions about how long and how well I had known Carbridge and also about the drinks we had had at the party, but over all this I had nothing to hide. The next witness was the policeman who had first been called to look at the body. According to custom, he was not questioned, but, having taken the oath, he gave a straightforward factual account of his actions, and the defending solicitor was asked whether he had any questions to put to the officer.

  There were none, and the medical evidence came next. Here there was a surprise in store for all of us. Having agreed that the deceased had died of a stab wound delivered from the back, the pathologist went on to provide forensic chapter and verse. There was no doubt that Carbridge had been stabbed in the heart, after there had been a very determined attempt to strangle him. When the defending solicitor took over, his first question was: “Did anything about the nature of the wound surprise you?”

  “Nothing about the nature of the wound itself, but I was surprised, when I made a more detailed study of the body after it had been removed by ambulance, to discover that the weapon actually found in the wound was not, in my opinion, the weapon which had been employed to complete the murder.”

  From my seat on the public benches I saw Detective-Inspector Bingley suddenly stiffen and half rise. The chairman of the bench noticed this, too, and so did the solicitor. Everybody could understand the importance of this statement: if a second weapon had been inserted in place of the murder weapon, the death need not have occurred either in the passage or, indeed, even at the hall of residence, although that it had taken place elsewhere seemed unlikely. The danger of transporting a dead man through the streets of London by daylight was incalculable and would only have been attempted by a madman.

  The defending solicitor then asked the pathologist whether, for the benefit of their worships, he could produce any evidence to support his statement.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I called in my colleague, Professor Antonio Corelli, the eminent pathologist who is now attached to St. Hubert’s Hospital.”

  “Is the professor in court?”

  “Yes, he is.” So Professor Antonio Corelli was called and, in such precise English that anybody would have known that he was a foreigner, backed up the statement that the murder weapon was not the weapon which had been left sticking in between the shoulders of the corpse.

  “Can you suggest what the nature of the murder weapon was?”

  “Except that it had a broader blade than the weapon which the murderer had then driven into the wound, no, I cannot. I could hazard a guess, but it might be misleading, so I shall say nothing of such speculations. What I will say is—” He went on to give all the pathological details. As he produced chapter and verse, less and less could I see Bull going for trial. The weapon in the wound had been a small kitchen knife and marks on the end of the handle indicated that the point of the knife had been inserted in the slightly torn edges of the original aperture and then the end of the handle had been struck a shrewd blow with a hammer or other implement to drive it well into the wound. The pathologist could even add a little more. The original weapon had been double-edged. The kitchen knife was sharp only along one edge. The cook at the hall of residence was called. She testified that her tally of kitchen cutlery was complete. She added that Bull lived on the premises and had access to the kitchen, “as he takes his elevenses and his meals with us, nor a milder-mannered man, no matter what his previous occupation might have been, and him proud of it and anyway somebody got to do them things and a big mistake ever to have done away—”

  “Yes, yes, thank you, Mrs. Geard. You may step down now.” She was followed by the two students, Freddie and Coral, who had used the kitchen to prepare the food for the party, but they had nothing useful to tell the court. They had been in and out of the kitchen a good many times, had passed the entrance to the passage, but had not been along it and had no idea that the electric lightbulb had disappeared.

  The magistrates retired. When they came back, the chairman said, “In view of what we have heard, and taking all the circumstances into account, we find that there is insufficient evidence on which to commit this man for trial.”

  “Well!” said Bull explosively. “I could have told you that without all this gas and gaiters and holding of me in custody like a common criminal. I been a man of the law meself in my time, I’d have you to know, and—”

  “Be quiet, man!” said the chairman of the bench, “and think yourself lucky. I am warning you that this is a reprieve, not an acquittal. There is nothing to prevent your being rearrested at a later date, if the police produce fresh evidence against you.”

  10

  The Disperser of Dreams

  Once the magistrates had refused, on the evidence (if one can call it that) given at the hearing, to commit Bull for trial, the heat, of course, was on the rest of us again.

  So far as Bingley was concerned, I think that, for a time at least, Bull remained the chief suspect, but I am sure I came next on the list. It still seems to me illogical that this should be so. All I had done, so far as he was aware, was that I had found the body and reported the fact. It was not as though he knew anything about what had happened at Crianlarich or the strange business of the body in the ruins on Rannoch Moor.

  Todd was also being pestered. Hera rang me up when I got back from the office one evening to tell me that Todd had turned up at her flat and wanted to have a talk with me.

  “Then why didn’t he come here instead of going to your place?” I asked.

  “He didn’t know when you got home from work.”

  “A likely excuse! All right, I’ll come round, but I can’t stay long. I’ve brought a manuscript home with me and Sandy wants my opinion on it as soon as I’ve read it. Be seeing you in about a quarter of an hour and you take jolly good care that Todd leaves when I do. I don’t trust that picker-up of unconsidered trifles.”

  “So that’s what you think I am!”

  “Forget it.”

  Todd was tall, debonair, and handsome—all the things, in fact, that I am not. He was also beautifully attired and his manners were impeccable.

  “How are you?” he said. “Bearing up all right?”

  “I might be, if that perishing policeman would get off my neck.”

  “Ah, you, to
o,” he said, standing up as Hera came into the room with the drinks. He took the tray from her, set it down, and added, “Poor old Bull is being needled, too. Too bad, after the beaks dismissed him without a stain on his character.”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” I said. “He was guilty of dereliction of duty. He ought to have replaced that bulb as soon as he knew it had gone. When did he know it had gone, I wonder?”

  “I’ve been talking to him. The policeman has rather dwelt on the point, of course, and Bull told me what he told him and he swears it’s the truth. He did not discover it had gone until about two in the afternoon, when he needed to visit the what-have-you. He pressed the switch and no light came on, so he uttered a bold word, cursing whatever student had pinched the bulb for one of the study-bedrooms, and went up the stairs to a loo on the second floor. After that, he says, he was kept on the trot by the people who were giving the party and, although he fully intended to replace the bulb, it meant fetching a ladder—as he is too short to manage without one—and for a time he was kept so busy running back and forth for the party preparations that—well, one can see how it would have been.”

  “But when I went along that corridor to have a fag, the blighter was doing damn-all except reading a newspaper and eating fish and chips. Resting after his labours, I suppose. Anyway, what has Bingley got on you that you wanted to talk to us about?”

  “That silly little clot Patsy Carlow has given the coppers reason to believe that Carbridge and I were rivals in love—love for her, if you please!”

  “Well, those Turkish pantaloons were really rather eye-catching. Had either of you seen her in them before?” asked Hera. “I thought they were very fetching.”

  “Ripeness is all,” said Todd, “if you’re going to flaunt yourself in that sort of garb, and pathetic young Patsy is hardly Mata Hari. However, to your question, so far as I am concerned the answer is no. Unfortunately, of course, the middle-aged Bingley saw her in those Turkish reach-me-downs when he came in and broke up the party that Saturday, and apparently was struck all of a heap. The result is that he believes her story that Carbridge and I were wildly infatuated with her and that we fell out because of this. I told him that at the party my reaction to the bizarre garments was to give her a fatherly smack on the seat of them, and what do you suppose he said when I told him that?”

  “I can’t wait to know,” said Hera.

  “He said, ‘Sexy, Mr. Todd, very sexy.’”

  “Well, apparently there are the three of us on his roster,” I said. “What do you expect me to do about it? I can’t extricate myself, let alone anybody else.”

  “I know. Safety in numbers, though. As long as he’s got three of us under suspicion—well, it’s better than only one. What I wanted to say was that I’ve told him nothing about that little affray at Crianlarich and I shan’t, either, unless I have to. You know what I mean.”

  “Perfectly. Neither will I mention Jane Minch’s sore feet,” I said, risking a shot in the dark. It went home, though.

  He looked at me in a speculative way and said, “So you worked that one out, did you?” He finished his drink and got up to go. “So it’s checkmate, is it?”

  “Let us say, with Mr. Peachum, ‘you know we have it in our power to hang each other.’ Anyway, thank goodness the law doesn’t go quite so far as that nowadays.”

  “Amen,” he said, “but I think it’s only a matter of time, you know.”

  “So what on earth were you getting at?” asked Hera, when she had shown him out. “How did you get him sewn up like that?”

  “Easily. It stands to reason that, once Jane’s feet began to trouble her, the rather insensitive and egotistic Carbridge would have insisted upon pushing ahead and leaving the brother and sister behind.”

  “They were all at Fort William.”

  “So were Perth and the students. My guess is that everybody except Carbridge and Todd got a lift or took the bus for the end part of the trip. That means those two blokes were alone together for the last part of The Way. From friend Todd’s reactions, I should say that my faculty of imagination, plus a logical and analytical mind, has paid dividends.”

  “You are cleverer than I thought. It must come from reading so many books,” she said mockingly. “What else have you deduced?”

  “That Todd is a snake in the grass.” She turned colour, so I added, “I quite like him, though, and I have nothing against snakes. Their venom has curative properties when it’s put to therapeutic use.”

  It was after this that I began to have bad dreams. I suppose most people have them at times, but to me they came as an unwelcome novelty. Mostly my dreams, when I could remember them in the morning, were of the most trivial content—I had dressed wrongly for some function or had found myself on a lonely road with no idea of how I had come to be there or in which direction I ought to be going. The worst dream I had had up to the night which followed the hearing at the police court and the talk with Todd, was that my and Sandy’s authors had turned into a pack of wolves and invaded the office thirsting for my blood.

  The new dreams were very much worse than that. For one thing, they persisted night after night and they were horrifying. I dreamt that Todd—strangely enough not Carbridge—had turned into the Ancient Mariner’s albatross and was hanging from my neck. I could not rid myself of him and he was stifling me with his weight.

  After the fourth night of this, Hera asked me what was wrong. She thought I must be sickening for something and advised me to see a doctor. Sandy was more sympathetic and to him I told my troubles.

  “It isn’t a doctor I need,” I said. “It’s something in the nature of an exorcist.”

  “Well, you’re on the books of one,” he said. “Go and see her. Of course it’s not Todd you’re dreaming about.”

  “You mean I’ve substituted him for Carbridge, but I don’t think that is the case. After all, I’m not really concerned in the murder, you know—not personally, I mean. I’m sorry for any man who dies before his time, but I’m not involved beyond that.”

  “You’ve had a couple of very nasty shocks, whether your conscious mind recognises that fact or not. Then you had the harassment of believing that Bingley suspected you. You go along to Dame Beatrice—”

  “And have my head looked at?”

  “Yes, if you care to put it like that.”

  Hera offered to accompany me, but I thought I should do better on my own. I said I was not going to keep her away from her job. She had some lucrative modelling on hand and I knew she did not want to lose the chance of it. Fortunately she was only too willing to listen to reason, so, having made an appointment, I went alone, as before, to the Stone House.

  “Ah,” said Dame Beatrice, when I had described my recurrent dream, “and how old were we when we first encountered the Ancient Mariner and his albatross?”

  Her reptilian smile and her use of the royal, the editorial, and the specialist’s plural impressed me about equally and not very deeply. I knew it was a joke.

  “I was ten and at my prep. school,” I said. “I had a woman teacher and she did not beat us for our misdemeanours, but caused us to learn poetry by heart. If we failed to come up to scratch, we were sent to the headmaster as stubborn recusants and he did beat us, so, of course, we learnt the stuff, however hard a grind it turned out to be.”

  “I see. Have you discussed this dream with your fiancée?”

  “No. I’ve told my business partner about it.”

  “So he is your good friend as well as your business partner. What had he to say?”

  “Well, rather strangely he said that the dream was not really about Todd. He said I was substituting Todd for someone else.”

  “I am sure he was right. In fact, I think you are substituting Todd for two other people. If you will not take my supposition amiss, I think one of them is your fiancée.”

  “Hera? Oh, no, I assure you!”

  “I am glad to hear that.” She did not look very glad. In
fact, those brilliant black eyes summed me up very shrewdly indeed and it was not difficult to imagine what she was thinking. She was right, too, although I was not prepared to admit it. I did find being engaged to Hera something of an onus at times. Her character was so much firmer than my own that I was often at a disadvantage when we discussed anything or argued about it. But Dame Beatrice had more to say. “What ought you to have told me about Mr. Carbridge when last you were here?”

  So I told her what had happened at Crianlarich. She nodded solemnly and then suddenly cackled.

  “You would have preferred to punch Mr. Todd, I suppose, but, to employ a phrase much used by Laura, he is above your weight, a taller and a more robust man than yourself.”

  “I wasn’t going to let Hera see me take a hiding.”

  “Very wise. A jousting knight must win or retire from the lists.”

  “Besides, although I somewhat distrust Todd, he doesn’t irritate me in the way Carbridge did.”

  “Well, Mr. Melrose, we will take it that you are suffering from suppressed hysteria due to your recent disquieting experiences. With your collaboration, I shall place you under light hypnosis and then I shall talk to you. You may answer me if you wish, but you will remember nothing of what we say, and the dream you have described will not recur. However, as I read the evidence, I do not think that at present you are very anxious to be married.”

  “Well, I am and I’m not,” I said truthfully.

  “Elucidate.”

  “Well, I’m very fond of Hera and I admire her very much, but when we announced our engagement to my business partner, Hera added that she wanted to come into the firm. She has some capital and I was willing to consider the idea, although I was not too keen on it, but Sandy was not at all in agreement, so that damped me down a bit. The last thing I want is any kind of a break with him.”

  “Your business needs an infusion of money?”

  “Well, I suppose most businesses do, but I don’t much want Hera to go out to work after we’re married. I pointed out to her that it would be jollier to find her all nice and domesticated at home when I got back each evening.”