Brazen Tongue (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

“Oh, no. She just went out, saying she knew her way. Apparently they usually go out two together.”

  “Yes. It’s horribly dark outside. A beast of a night, too. It’s turned to rain again, although we can’t hear it in here. Did the others expect her back?”

  “Yes, I suppose they did. She took the official torch, anyway. Would she have done that if she’d been going to stay? I spoke to the others, and they think she’s gone over to see an auxiliary fireman.”

  Ferdinand frowned, but thoughtfully, not in annoyance. He scrawled some meaningless lines on an odd piece of paper, then suddenly crossed the room, still with the pen in his hand, and spoke to a couple of men who were silently playing cards at a table in an angle of the wall. Sally saw them shrug and grin, and glance at one another. Ferdinand came back to her, and said:

  “I expect it’s all right. You go back, and try to get some sleep. I’ll see to it, Sally. I’ll send Budge or Simmonds over.”

  “Oh, heavens! I didn’t come in to make a fuss! I only came in to talk to you for a bit.”

  “No, no. It’s odd, you see, just a little, that the girl should have taken the torch. They’re very nice and considerate to one another, really, the girls in there. She wouldn’t have taken the torch. I think, for my own peace of mind, I’ll send a messenger over. Don’t be alarmed, my dear. An extensive acquaintance with murderers has probably made me unduly…” He broke off at the expression of incredulous horror on Sally’s face. “It’s all right! Don’t look like that, for heaven’s sake! I was only joking.”

  “Yes,” said Sally, “but…”

  “Back you go,” said Ferdinand, “and I’ll send you the news of her safety—inconsiderate little fathead—as soon as the man comes back. By the way, here’s that note for the girl who came in so late.”

  Sally returned to the telephonist’s room with the note. A girl in one of the arm-chairs rose out of it and, with a gesture, invited Sally to take her turn.

  “It’s the only comfortable sleep you can get in here,” she said.

  “No, no thanks, really,” said Sally. “I just…” She crossed over to the young reporter who was awake, and was ruefully rubbing pins and needles out of her long legs.

  “This place!” said the reporter. “Hullo! You look a bit like Banquo’s ghost. Feel all right?”

  “Yes, quite all right,” said Sally. “The fact is…”

  She was interrupted by a sudden startled exclamation from the girl in the knitted suit.

  “Grasshoppers!” she said. “Where on earth is Fletcher?”

  “If that’s the girl with the red hair,” said one of the teachers, “we were wondering about her ourselves. But somebody said she’d gone…”

  “Yes, but she ought to be back! She never stays out for more than half an hour. For one thing, she’d soon get the sack. Besides, she’s got our torch!”

  “I think we ought to go out to the lavatories to see whether she’s been taken ill. Or has anybody else been over there since she went?” said the older woman in tweeds. “After all, she did say she’d had cocktails. Of course, she may be quite used to them, but…”

  “Nobody’s been across since she went out,” said one of the girls in slacks, and another observed, “Not without the torch to that particular ‘Better ’Ole.’”

  “I’ve got a torch,” said a teacher, looking up from the table. “You can borrow it, if you like.”

  At this moment the hatch was opened from the men’s side, and Simmonds put his head in.

  “Sir Ferdinand’s compliments, and nothing to report from the auxiliary firemen, Miss Sally. Sir Ferdinand thinks the permanent ladies ought to make a little investigation out the back, in case the young lady should perhaps have been taken ill or fainted.”

  He withdrew, closed the hatch, and the girls all looked at one another.

  “I’ll go,” said the knitted suit, “if somebody else will come.”

  “Come on,” said Sally to the reporter. At least five others volunteered to accompany them.

  “Come on, then, Beach,” said the knitted suit to a pair of navy-blue slacks surmounted by a blithe canary jumper. “Put your coats on, people. It’s ’orrid cold after this stuffy hole, going out in the nice fresh air.”

  “I believe it’s wet, too,” said Sally.

  She led the way, and one by one the others slipped through the inner and then the outer door. It was new ground to Sally. She found herself in a narrow passage which led round the angle of the building into what would have been a quadrangle had it had a fourth side, but this was missing. On three sides, however, loomed buildings, some of them partly screened by dripping trees.

  “Stick to the path,” said the leader of the party, using the torch, although quite unconsciously, to guide only her own footsteps. “There’s a rockery with a fountain in the middle. You don’t want to fall over that.”

  “Oh, lor! This battery’s gone!” said the bearer of the only other torch. “What a curse! These small batteries are frightfully scarce. You can’t get them anywhere in the town.”

  “Fletcher is a nuisance,” said somebody, loudly and cheerfully. “She needn’t have taken the torch!”

  The path was asphalt, and was about four feet wide. It was slippery and treacherous with autumn leaves which had fallen thickly upon it from trees at the rear of the building. The rain had made the leaves sodden. Sally was last in the procession. Everybody kept to the path.

  The small building for which they were making was on the opposite side of the yard, however, and the leader made a sudden, disconcerting dive across to it.

  “Not right over the rockery!” said someone. “It isn’t a steeplechase! Ow! I’ve stepped in a puddle!”

  Soon Sally saw the rockery, and had an absurd impulse, due, she thought, to the effect—a curious light-headed feeling—which the fresh, cold, rainy air of the night was having upon her after the close and stuffy room, to climb the rockery and dance on it. Abandoning the idea, she reached, in the wake of the little party, the entrance to the building they were in search of. It was labelled heavily in white Roman capitals on a blank ground: ‘Ladies.’ The leader flashed the torch. The building had three compartments. It took less than ten seconds to flash the torch into each.

  “Well, she ain’t here,” said someone. “Now how do we go?”

  “She’s been bad, though,” said the reporter’s voice from the other side of the rockery. “Hope she isn’t sickening for something. Some earth or sand on it wouldn’t do any harm. I know where there’s a leaking sandbag.”

  “Oh, hallo, Pat,” said Sally. “I’d lost track of you.”

  “Well, if you will come last. Where has this idiot got to, do you suppose? Come on, people. Follow me for the sand, and everyone scoop up a couple of handfuls. This vomit of hers may be infectious, and, anyway, it would be a kindly thought to cover it up, don’t you think? Lend me the torch, if the thought of it turns you green.”

  Picking their way, she and Sally and one or two of the others performed their charitable act.

  Then they returned, along the dark wall of the building, to the Control Room, and settled down.

  “You know, I don’t like it,” said Sally, after a bit. “I wish I’d brought a torch. I’d go and have another look for her. She may have come over all bad in the yard and fainted. We didn’t look about particularly. She had certainly been very sick.”

  “I expect she felt ill and went home. I know I’d like to,” said one of the permanent staff. “I expect she’s safely in bed.”

  “And we’d have fallen over her, surely,” the reporter remarked, “if she’d been lying out in the yard. She knows the way all right, and she had a torch. It seems to me that she’d just have dropped on the path. If she’d fainted we couldn’t have helped but stumble over her.”

  “I’m going to see whether one or two of the men will come and help look,” said Sally, who had inherited a good deal of Lady Selina’s dogged insistence upon doing what she felt was the right thing, howe
ver inconvenient and annoying this might be to herself or other people. “I don’t believe she’d go home. She didn’t seem a bit that sort to me. She’d have let us know if she was going.”

  “All right, then. Meanwhile, I will read this note, and see what Sour-Puss has got in store for me,” said the reporter. “Tell you when you come back.”

  When Sally returned, however, the young reporter had gone into the yard again.

  Meanwhile, Sir Ferdinand and the faithful Simmonds had gone round to the courtyard from the Control Room entrance. Sally went out to them, and soon could see the light of Sir Ferdinand’s torch. Having no torch of her own, she made for him, and asked:

  “Any luck, Bertie?”

  The men searched the ground methodically, a yard at a time. Simmonds followed his employer, saving his own torch until Sir Ferdinand should require it.

  “Look out for the rockery,” said Sally. They came upon it the next minute.

  “Looks more like a cairn,” said Sir Ferdinand. “And why the hole at the top?”

  “It’s a fountain, I think,” Sally answered, “But I’ve never seen it in daylight. I say, don’t climb it, Bertie. You’ll break your ankle, or something.”

  “Hullo, you people? Any luck?” enquired Pat from the darkness near the gate.

  “Sally,” said Sir Ferdinand, from the top, without paying any attention to the young reporter’s question, “go back with Simmonds to the Control Room and ask Mr. Arthur to come here.”

  “You haven’t…?”

  “Yes, she’s here, and she’s had a nasty fall. Her head’s in rather a mess. And when you’ve found Mr. Arthur (he’s a surgeon) you might ring up for an ambulance. Miss Mort, you go with her.”

  “Anything wrong, sir?” asked Simmonds, who detected an unusual note in Ferdinand’s calm voice.

  “Yes, badly wrong, I’m afraid. Go in our way, and ask Mr. Spence to get through to the police. Tell him quietly, mind. We don’t want a fuss at present. Here, take my torch, and get a move on.”

  He was left there alone. There was nothing, he knew, that the cleverest surgeon could do for the red-haired girl. There was not the slightest doubt that she was dead. Her feet were resting in the wide, deep bowl of the fountain. Her body was awkwardly twisted over the side. Her forehead—she lay face upwards—was horrid with blood, and her face was almost obscured by it.

  • CHAPTER 4 •

  Anatomy for Artists.

  Title of a book by Eugene Wolff, M.B., F.R.C.S., illustrated by George Charlton.

  • 1 •

  Detective-Inspector Stallard was having his tea on the afternoon of September the twenty-eighth when the telephone rang. This was the third notice he received of strange deaths which had taken place within his district. His sergeant reported the finding of the body of a woman in the A.R.P. tank in Longdale Lane.

  “Don’t you know who it is?” he demanded. His piece of cake was in his hand, for he had stepped to the telephone still holding it, and whilst he listened to the sergeant’s reply, he took a solemn bite. It had been odd enough to hear that one of the best-known of the Town Councillors, a man named Blackburn-Smith, had been discovered dead in a doorway in the black-out, and that a post-mortem examination had resulted in a discovery of arsenic in the body; it had been exciting enough to hear of the Report Centre telephonist, Lillie Fletcher, who had been found murdered in the Town Hall yard; it was overwhelming to hear of a third unnatural death within the same twenty-four hours.

  “We’ve no idea, sir,” his sergeant assured him over the telephone. “Will you step around, sir, and see if p’raps she means anything at all to you?”

  It did not take Stallard very long to make quite certain that the dead woman, who was dressed neatly, but not extravagantly, in a very plain white night-gown and a pair of flannel drawers, meant nothing whatever to him.

  He stared at the pallid, puffy face and darkened eyelids a long time after the police doctor had concluded his examination, but not the faintest stirring of an excellent memory for the faces of his flock gave him any assistance whatever.

  “No, I don’t know her,” he was forced to admit. “Any marks of identification?”

  “Only the laundry mark on the night-dress, sir,” said the sergeant, pointing it out.

  The police doctor had no difficulty in discovering that the woman had drowned, and the local paper, with supreme contempt for the coroner’s findings, hinted darkly at murder, and demanded extra police patrols during the black-out hours; the coroner, who had sat without a jury, had decided that the deceased had taken her own life, probably in a fit of melancholy due to the outbreak of the war, and had hinted that she was possibly a refugee from Germany or Austria. His considered verdict was that the deceased had taken her own life whilst the balance of her mind was affected, and in this merciful summing-up the young inspector, already almost stunned by local repercussions following the other two deaths, found himself happy to concur. He was feeling, with two murders and a suicide at one time in his district, a little like the Scottish minister who prayed for rain, and had the parish almost immediately flooded. “Loard, Loard,” he had then observed, “I ken weel we prayed for rain; but, Loard, this is rideeculous!”

  It was not in the least ridiculous, however, but annoying and perturbing, when a correspondent of the local paper, which, in the words of its exultant editor, was making hay while the sun shone, pointed out that it was strange that the unknown woman should have drowned herself in the A.R.P. tank when the canal was quite near and much handier. The paper, in fact, decided the inspector, was determined to find a third murder. He called upon the editor and protested. He even threatened him a little. The editor, who had been resident in the town thirty years, said, talking through a blue pencil which he was holding between his teeth:

  “Don’t you think yourself, though, that it was funny, Inspector? You would, if you knew this town as well as I do. I never publish anonymous letters. That letter was signed, and it had an address at the top. If I told you whose, you’d hardly believe me. Naturally, we didn’t print it.”

  “Well, whose?” asked the inspector, immediately.

  “Joe Canopy’s”

  “Give me his address, please. I don’t know him.”

  “Joseph Canopy, master and part owner of the barge Tulip, now somewhere between here and Manchester. The actual address he gave was the Boatmen’s Institute here.”

  “Ah! Have you got the original letter?”

  “Oh, yes.” He picked up the house telephone.

  The inspector then saw the police doctor who had examined the body.

  “Any reason to suppose that the suicide case was drowned in the canal?” he enquired. The police doctor was a red-nosed, brisk, pugnacious man of fifty, and was doctor to the local football team as well as to the police. He rubbed his chin, and answered cautiously:

  “Young man, you’re putting words into my mouth. You’ve been reading the local paper.”

  “So have you, then. That letter was written by a chap on a canal barge. Fellow named…”

  “Don’t tell me. I know. Joe Canopy. Regular sea-lawyer, that chap.”

  “Oh?” The inspector’s youthful brow cleared rapidly, and he grinned. “Thanks for the tip, Doctor. I’ll do as much for you one day.”

  “Eh?” said the doctor, staring after him as he walked past the window and down to the green-painted gate. “Hm! Pity you didn’t give me another five minutes!”

  He went across the room to a glass-fronted cupboard labelled facetiously, “Mrs. Moon’s ’Orrors,” and took down a small jar. In it was floating a two-inch sliver of river weed, fine and thin as a hair. He regarded it affectionately, holding the glass up to the light, and then replaced it carefully. He locked the ghoulish little cupboard and pocketed the key. Next time he encountered the inspector he said, provokingly:

  “Wonder whether Joe saw anything?”

  The inspector, who had spent a difficult hour and a half at the residence of the late Councillor
Blackburn-Smith, groaned feebly, but refused to play to the doctor’s opening gambit. Nevertheless, his conscience troubled him. Apart from letters in the local paper, common sense informed him that to drown oneself in an A.R.P. tank offers difficulties and has disadvantages. With the canal so near, and the nights so peculiarly black, it seemed to have been sheer idiocy on the woman’s part. Still, he reflected, when the balance of one’s mind is disturbed, perhaps one automatically prefers the difficult action to the easy one, and is prepared to accomplish considerable and uncomfortable athletic feats in order to follow one’s bent.

  Nevertheless, he was not satisfied. He rang up the Manchester police, and asked to be put in touch with Joseph Canopy, of the barge Tulip, when that master of craft should tie up in the Ship Canal. Then he went back to his notes upon Councillor Smith.

  • 2 •

  For fifty-nine years the Blackburn-Smith family had lived in the house at the top of the hill. The new main road, up which the buses ran, was a quarter of a mile from their turning, and therefore their house retained much the same characteristics as it had had in mid-Victorian times, when it was built. Looking at it, one imagined the stern father, pious mother, and eleven children who had lived there in 1860. One did not believe that so obviously a family residence could be inhabited only by an uncle, a niece and a nephew, still less that the uncle could have been discovered dead in a doorway in the black-out of September, 1939.

  Patricia Mort, reporter, of the Willington Record, stood at the gate and pensively licked a copying-ink pencil, then she took out a mirror from her handbag and put out her tongue, only to click it at the violet spot on its tip and put the mirror away again.

  Pat had come to interview the relatives of the deceased, and was wondering how best to set about her task. All her reports for the local paper were based upon interviews with such of the residents as had achieved notoriety or fame, but, until the dramatic discovery of Councillor Blackburn-Smith’s body in a shop doorway late at night (by two young people whom she had already interviewed), she had had little practice in reporting violent death, for street accidents were not in her province.