[Mrs Bradley 41] - Three Quick and Five Dead Read online

  The broad path ended, as Laura had known it would, in a vast pond, shallow, but with treacherously muddy fringes. Here she had to turn back. Without hope, before she did so she called the dog by name, repeating it several times. Then she stood still and listened, for, from some distance away, she thought she had heard a despairing howl.

  She called again and was answered. Certain that, roughly at least, she had located the sound, she ran back along the path, repeating the call, and then, tripping over the roots of a beech-tree in her haste, she plunged in among the undergrowth along a narrow track which suddenly opened up among the gorse and bracken.

  Her heart missed a beat as she saw a foot, with a woman’s shoe on it, sticking out from behind a gorse bush. At the same moment Fergus sidled up to her and licked her hand.

  (4)

  Laura ran all the way back to the Stone House and precipitated herself into the morning-room where Dame Beatrice was seated at breakfast.

  ‘Will you please ring up the police?’ she gasped. ‘The big boys, not the village cop. I’m too breathless to talk to them myself. Tell them to come here at once. It’s urgent.’

  Dame Beatrice asked no questions, but went immediately to the telephone in the hall. After a very short time she returned and poured Laura a cup of coffee.

  ‘They’ll be here as soon as they can, but they have some distance to come,’ she said, ‘so you have time for breakfast before you need talk to the Superintendent.’

  ‘Not sure that I want any breakfast.’ Laura had recovered her breath. She drank the coffee and passed her cup for more. ‘It’s the German girl. I think she’s been murdered. I’ll have to lead the police to the spot. It might take them ages to find it on their own. Fergus is guarding the body and won’t come away.’

  ‘I will accompany them and disengage the dog. I should not wish him to bite a policeman. Now please have some breakfast. We may have a long morning before us and nothing is to be gained by feeling faint from hunger. No, don’t tell me anything more until you have eaten.’

  Laura contrived to grin, and Dame Beatrice, motioning her to sit still, went to the sideboard to serve her. Laura discovered that, in spite of shock, she was still hungry.

  ‘I suppose you’d like to hear the details now,’ she said, pushing aside an empty plate and helping herself to marmalade. ‘Well, here’s what happened.’

  ‘You think it is the German girl from whose mother you bought Fergus?’ Dame Beatrice enquired when she had heard the tale. ‘And you think that when the girl realised she was in danger, she blew the dog-whistle which you say is on a cord around her neck?’

  ‘Well, something caused Fergus to vanish into the mist last night. It looked to me as though somebody had tightened the cord, too. There’s a deep red mark on her neck.’

  ‘That would have induced unconsciousness, no doubt. I suppose you are perfectly certain she was dead?’

  ‘Good gracious, yes. No doubt about it at all. You’ll know what I mean when you see her.’

  This came about in due course. At Laura’s suggestion, since it would mean shortening by at least a mile the walking-distance between the Stone House and the body, she drove her own small car, with Dame Beatrice as passenger, and led the police car, containing a superintendent, a sergeant and a uniformed constable, through the village and along the main road until they left the two cars on a wide stretch of grass at a stone bridge and followed the path through the wicket-gate which marked the boundary of the enclosure.

  At the other side of the enclosure Laura led the way confidently through the woods to the spot where she had come upon the body. The dog was still on guard. Dame Beatrice went up to him, while the Superintendent halted his men and Laura stood back.

  ‘Come, Fergus,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You’re a good dog and you must be hungry.’ She held up a string bag she had brought with her. ‘Come along with me. It’s all right now.’ The dog pricked his ears and looked into her face. ‘Good boy. It’s all right now,’ she repeated encouragingly. The great hound sighed and slowly got to his feet. She led him away from the body and along the path until they came to the river. On the bridge she spread out the food, patted him, and stood beside him. The dog looked up at her again, then, trusting her soothing voice, he ate voraciously, then padded to the edge of the stream. When he had finished drinking, she said to him firmly, ‘Stay’. Then she returned to the others.

  ‘Perhaps you’d take a look at her, ma’am,’ said the Superintendent, who had worked with Dame Beatrice before, ‘and let me have an opinion as to time of death, then Gunter can stay here until we get back with our own doctor and the photographer. We’ll need a stretcher to move her when they’ve done their stuff. Can’t get an ambulance up here.’

  Dame Beatrice looked at her watch and then knelt beside the body. The time was a quarter to eleven.

  (5)

  ‘But it doesn’t make sense,’ said Laura, when she and Dame Beatrice were in her little car and on the way home with Fergus lying along the back seat.

  ‘What doesn’t make sense, child?’

  ‘The time of death. You say that poor Miss Schumann has been dead for at least twenty-four hours, so why would Fergus have answered her whistle only about seventeen hours before I found her body?’

  ‘The answer would be obvious if we could take rigor mortis as an infallible guide, but that, as you heard me remark to the Superintendent, we cannot.’

  ‘But would even a tricky thing such as rigor be as much as seven or more hours out?’

  ‘It is unlikely, certainly. The conditions were normal, although I doubt whether she was killed in those woods. There were no signs of a struggle. It would be most interesting to find out how the dog managed to locate the body.’

  ‘The only thing which would have made Fergus leave me, and go careering off like that, was that somebody he knew even better than he knew me must have called him. He couldn’t have heard a voice, otherwise I would have heard it, too – you’ve said yourself that my hearing is pretty acute – therefore he must have answered a dog-whistle, a sound he can hear, but I, like most other adults, can’t. Even so, a dog-whistle only carries for between three and four hundred yards, or so Mrs Schumann told me when I bought Fergus, and the body was a good two miles from the edge of the common where Fergus left me.’

  ‘Of course, we have no proof that Fergus heard a dog-whistle at all, have we?’

  ‘No, and I don’t believe Fergus would have answered any old whistle, any more than he answered mine this morning. Mrs Schumann had a special call for her dogs. She told me so. She wouldn’t teach it to me because she said it would be best to train Fergus to answer my own personal note which, so far, I haven’t invented. So what about that?’

  ‘If you will pursue your present line of argument, you will come to a conclusion. Whether that conclusion is correct, only time, of course, will show. By the way, when the police have done the necessary things with the body, the Superintendent will want a word with you.’

  ‘As many as he likes – not that I can help him very much. You don’t suppose Mrs Schumann murdered her daughter and then whistled up Fergus, do you?’

  The Superintendent arrived at the Stone House at half-past two. He and Laura were old friends. He knew of her husband’s position at Scotland Yard and he was honorary uncle to her son Hamish.

  ‘Before I take a statement from you, Mrs Gavin,’ he said, ‘I suppose I’d better warn you that you may be wanted at the inquest. This death is so clearly a case of murder that I don’t suppose anything but identification and the medical evidence will be taken, but, as you found the body, there might be something …’

  ‘Right. I should have attended the inquest in any case.’

  ‘Yes, so I supposed. Now, perhaps I could have your account of how you came to find this Miss Schumann. You knew her, I gather?’

  ‘Oh, yes, in a way. I bought my dog from her mother last April. I did not know her before that, and that is all I had to do with her. As I told you
, she lived with her mother over at Leveret Copse, on the other side of those woods. Mrs Schumann breeds Irish wolfhounds and clumber spaniels. She exhibited at Crufts this year. That’s how I got the address.’

  ‘We’ve been to see Mrs Schumann to break the news and get her to identify the body. She’s terribly cut up, of course. This daughter was one of twins. The other is a son and, according to his mother, not much good. She poured out quite a lot, but, naturally, she was in such an upset state that we shan’t take official notice of what she said until after the inquest. By then we shall have made more enquiries. Now, what can you tell me about your discovery of the body?’

  Laura gave him her account of this, and the reason for her early-morning walk.

  ‘Interesting about the dog running off like that,’ he commented, when she had told her tale. ‘You assume he was obeying a signal that he recognised?’

  ‘I’m sure he was, but there’s a mystery attached to that. I thought Miss Schumann must have whistled him up when she found she was being attacked, but, if she has been dead as long as Dame Beatrice thinks, she couldn’t have whistled up the dog at something after four last evening, which is when Fergus left me and went galloping off across the common.’

  ‘How far does a dog-whistle carry?’

  ‘That’s another point. Not more than three to four hundred yards. Fergus couldn’t possibly have heard it from where the body was found. I worked that out. But, if he didn’t get the message, what could have made him go careering off like that?’

  ‘It’s a bit of a mystery, Mrs Gavin. The likeliest thing is that he went off for some other reason, and not because he had heard the whistle.’

  ‘Well, whatever it was, it led him to find the body and mount guard over it.’

  ‘You say you bought him in April. How old is he?’

  ‘One year and a bit. Of course, I intended to buy a tiny puppy. It was for Hamish to show off at school. But the puppies were too young to be weaned, and Hamish refused to wait and, in any case, had fallen heavily for Fergus and implored me to buy him. Mrs Schumann was quite keen to sell, and accepted my offer of a lower price than the dog was worth because her daughter had had a great disappointment over him. It appeared that she’d picked Fergus out, bought him from her mother and reared him herself. She intended, when he was fully trained, to give him as a birthday present to her fiancé, but the fiancé wouldn’t have him and they had a row and she was left with the dog, and, I’ve no doubt, was pretty sick about it.’

  ‘So there was a fiancé, was there? And a quarrel about the dog? That might prove interesting. I don’t suppose you’ve met the young man?’

  ‘She did not mention his name. I don’t even know whether he is an Englishman …’

  ‘Ah, yes. The Schumanns were naturalised, but were of German origin. Mrs Schumann has given us the family history. When you found the body you probably spotted something rather interesting which might also prove useful to us. Skewered over the heart by a thin steel knitting-needle was a piece of paper. The bushes had kept it pretty dry in spite of the mist, and on it you may have read: In Memoriam 325.’

  ‘Yes, I saw it, of course. One couldn’t miss it,’ said Laura. ‘Could it tie up with the Nazis, do you think? Revenge for a death in a concentration camp – something of that sort?’

  ‘It’s possible. I don’t want to worry Mrs Schumann more than I can help until she’s had time to recover from the shock, but, of course, I’ll have to question her again. She told me a good deal, none of it very useful, but I may be able to get something more when she’s had time to think things over.’

  (6)

  The medical evidence given at the inquest was straightforward and uncompromising. The girl, whose age was given as twenty-four, had been garrotted by a piece of stout cord which would certainly have rendered her unconscious, and death had been made certain by manual strangulation, the murderer having used his right hand and having gripped his already unconscious victim from the front. There were no fingernail scratches, but there were a series of small bruises on the victim’s throat, and there was the impression of a thumb on the right side of her neck, high up and under the lower jaw over the cornu of the thyroid. The jury had no doubt about returning a verdict of murder. That it was by person or persons unknown went without the necessity of a formal statement, but the jury added it, all the same.

  (7)

  Assistant-Commissioner Robert Gavin had taken week-end leave, but had returned to London on the day before the inquest. He was sufficiently intrigued by the murder of Karen Schumann, however, to come down again to the Stone House on the following Friday. He and Laura had a bedroom and a sitting-room of their own there, and a flat in Dame Beatrice’s Kensington home, for both of which he insisted on paying rent. He would have preferred, with masculine independence, to have had a place of his own, but Laura, good-naturedly obedient to most of his wishes, had remained obstinately non-co-operative over this one, her place (as she had pointed out very firmly when she agreed to marry) being with Dame Beatrice, whose company she preferred, she added relentlessly, to that of anybody else on earth, and Gavin, who, in his silent, undemonstrative way, adored her, had given in, wisely realising that she meant exactly what she said. Fortunately, his own admiration for Dame Beatrice was boundless and it was certainly comforting to know that his headstrong, comely, imaginative wife was in her care and, while so situated, would do as Dame Beatrice told her, and not get into too much mischief.

  On the Friday following the inquest, therefore, he was again at the Stone House and at a quarter to five was taking tea in the library with the ladies.

  ‘No more news, I suppose?’ he asked. ‘What happened to the girl’s mother?’

  ‘She seems to have found herself a lodger, a Spanish girl who is at a south-west Redbrick, but wants to be in the country on Saturdays and Sundays and for the Christmas vacation,’ said Laura. ‘She speaks four languages, including German and English. It seems an ideal arrangement. With the money she pays, and a little money the daughter left, and the cash for the dog-breeding, Mrs Schumann thinks she will be able to manage quite nicely, so that’s a blessing.’

  ‘And how is Phillips getting on?’ asked Gavin.

  ‘I do not think the Superintendent’s enquiries are leading anywhere at present,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘Oh, well, it’s early days yet,’ said Gavin. He fondled the dog’s rough head. ‘Why can’t you talk?’ he asked him. ‘Did somebody whistle you up that night?’

  ‘If so, the man must have been on horseback and led the dog on,’ said Laura. ‘The body was a good two miles from where Fergus left me, and the whistle doesn’t carry more than, at the very most, about one-eighth of that distance.’

  ‘A horseman moving forward and enticing the dog to follow him all the time, while he himself kept a few hundred yards ahead?’ said Gavin thoughtfully. ‘A bike would have been just as good, and a great deal quieter. You can hear a galloping horse quite a long way off.’

  ‘I did hear the sound of hooves, but I thought it was the Forest ponies. They’re always about on the common.’

  ‘Have you suggested this theory of yours to the Superintendent? It’s quite a likely one. I certainly think he should pay considerable attention to the fact that the dog went belting off like that. After all, Fergus is a sober sort of fellow, aren’t you?’ he added, putting his hand under the dog’s chin and looking into his eyes. ‘The thing is, if this is what happened, was the horseman or cyclist the murderer? If so, why did he want to lead the dog to the body? It seems a lunatic sort of proceeding. Was the girl pregnant, by the way?’

  ‘No,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘nor was it the usual pattern of a sex crime.’

  ‘No Jack the Ripper stuff?’

  ‘There had been no attempt at anything but manual strangulation preceded by the tightening of a ligature – in this case, a stout cord attached to a dog-whistle – which must have induced unconsciousness.’

  ‘Dog-whistles do seem to insist on
presenting themselves, don’t they? Any other unusual features?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Laura. ‘Fastened to the body by a very thin steel knitting-needle was a bit of paper marked In Memoriam 325.’

  ‘Well, that means Phillips has something to go on, at any rate.’

  ‘The bit of paper had been taken from one of those very ordinary unlined writing tablets that you buy with envelopes to match, and, although probably there will be fingerprints on it, they won’t match with any on record, I wouldn’t mind betting. As for the number 325, well, it probably means nothing except to the murderer,’ said Laura.

  ‘It must have meant something to the victim, too, and that might indicate that it means something to somebody else – her mother, maybe. Is there any chance of my having a word with her, I wonder? I’ll mention it to Phillips, of course. It’s his case, not mine.’

  ‘Superintendent Phillips will be delighted to hear from you, I am certain of that,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘and Mrs Schumann will be more than willing to help in any way she can.’

  Both these statements appeared to be true. Gavin drove to the police station and was received with a welcoming smile and given a comfortable chair in Superintendent Phillips’ office.

  ‘Good of you to come, sir,’ said Phillips. ‘I haven’t much doubt that we shall call in the Yard, and I’ve suggested to the Chief Constable that it ought to be sooner rather than later.’

  ‘If you’ve decided on it, then I agree that the sooner the better,’ said Gavin. ‘But why? You’ve handled cases of murder before this. What seems to be the trouble?’

  ‘Well, sir, it seems to me that we need to know a lot more than we do about the poor young woman’s background. It seems to me that the motive for the crime must lie somewhere in her past.’

  ‘Interesting that you should think so. What I wondered was whether you’d have any objection to my having a word with the mother. I don’t want to interfere, of course.’

  ‘Only too glad, sir. She’s quite co-operative and seems to be getting over the shock all right, but, unless you can get more help from her than we’ve been able to do, I doubt whether you’ll feel justified in spending your time on her. There’s only one thing, sir. This kind of crime is apt to be one of a series, so I hope we catch the joker good and quick!’