The Worsted Viper (Mrs. Bradley) Page 5

  —From Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

  “That’s the tale as the young ladies told it, ma’am,” the police inspector concluded, “and, as I say, it checks up. There was nobody on board when Miss Menzies got to the cruiser, and as soon as she had picked up the other ladies they telephoned from Wroxham for us and a doctor. The woman was dead all right. Murdered in the bedroom, most likely, and then dragged into the kitchen. Stabbed clean through the heart, and when we got her to the mortuary, this was found.” He opened a drawer in the desk, and took out a curious object. It was a toy snake made or worsted in the way that children make woollen reins on a cotton reel with four tin-tacks, so that its body was solid and circular. Some beads had been sewn on here and there, and its head, which was made of two pieces of soft leather stuck together with thin glue, was horribly and cleverly an imitation of the flat broad head of the English viper, which is without the head-shield common to most specimens of poisonous snakes.

  “You can handle it as freely as you wish, ma’am. It’s been gone all over for fingerprints, but there’s nothing to be got from such a surface. If it was beaded all over we might have got something, although I doubt whether, even then, it would have been a clear enough print for identification purposes. But it’s mostly worsted, as you can see. It was pushed partly into the wound. You can see the blood on the leather. Somebody very nastily barmy did that, ma’am. Sort of murder that leads to others, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “I know the three students well, of course,” Mrs. Bradley remarked. She drew out a small magnifying glass and examined the worsted viper with very great interest.

  “We questioned them separately after we’d had their story,” the inspector observed, “but there wasn’t any more to be got. Of course, only Miss Menzies can swear to the boat being there. The dinghy with the muffled oars and rowlocks, I mean. The other two didn’t see it. And only Miss Menzies can swear to hearing what she takes to have been the sound of muffled oars going past the cruiser in the night. Still, what she says about the time fits in pretty well with what the doctor says. Thinks the woman was killed after midnight, and not later than three in the morning. What I can’t make out, though, is why on earth the man didn’t make his getaway at once. Why leave it until the young ladies were up and about? It was touch and go they didn’t see him slip past while they were having their breakfast. He must have known the night before that their cruiser was anchored on the Broad—or why should he muffle his oars? As one of the ladies pointed out, you couldn’t hear the sound of ordinary rowing from that bungalow. Even when he started up the engine of their own cruiser, they didn’t really notice. Those trees are thick just there, and it’s wonderful how a wood will muffle sounds.”

  “I’d like to see the bungalow,” said Mrs. Bradley, rising. “And I’d like to get the students to take me, if you don’t mind. I suppose there’s no reason why they shouldn’t go there again?”

  “Not the slightest, if they’ve no objection themselves. It seems Miss Menzies realised it might be murder. I couldn’t get her to tell me why—just said she probably had it on the brain—but she doesn’t strike me as that kind of fanciful young lady.”

  “I expect she felt the worsted viper in the wound. You remember that she was the one who felt for the woman’s heartbeats. She probably thought it was the weapon still in the body.”

  “Ah, most likely, ma’am. I didn’t think of that. The other two said she went pretty white about the gills. I’ll ring up, ma’am, and see whether I can locate them. According to the schedule they worked out for us, they should be somewhere in the South Walsham district by now. And that’s another thing. If our gentleman with the dinghy is still on the Broads he’ll take some tracking down, especially as we’ve nothing at all to go on—no description or such, and not even the name of the dinghy. Of course, if we could assume that it’s Mr. Bleriot himself, well, we know him all right, but, as you say, no use to jump to conclusions, and it may not be him, or anything to do with him, at all.”

  “How did he come to disappear?” Mrs. Bradley enquired, sitting down again and taking out her notebook.

  “Ah, thereby hangs a tale,” replied the inspector. “That is, according to the super here. He points out they had nothing on him, so couldn’t ask him to report to them, or anything of that kind, but fortunately he puts up at that very hotel in Tombland where you’re staying yourself. The manager is a friend of the superintendent, so he was able to take him aside and put it to him that the police could do with an occasional report on the gentleman’s movements, and were to be notified immediately if he looked like moving from the hotel. Well, it was a case of a midnight flit—only, our gentleman leaves money on the dressing table well over and above the amount of his bill, with a very civil note, saying he’s been called away by his Muse to write poetry in the North, and hopes they won’t mind him going off so suddenly. He must have shinned down a water-pipe or something, for the last that anyone saw was him going up to bed as usual, round about eleven o’clock, and nobody to be seen when the chambermaid took his tea in in the morning.”

  “Luggage?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  “He only had a couple of suitcases. Both were still there, but there wasn’t much in them. He must have made a brown-paper parcel and dropped it out of the window before he began his climb down.”

  “I wonder whether I might be permitted to see the body?” Mrs. Bradley suggested. “It is just possible that I might be able to determine whether Amos Bleriot was the type to commit such a murder. A stab through the heart, I think you said?”

  “Very clean, ma’am, and only one blow.”

  “Hm! Not so easy to accomplish as some people might think. I should be very glad of an opportunity to see it for myself.”

  “I think that could be managed, ma’am, you having met the superintendent, and also having Inspector Pirberry’s OK. I suppose it would be too much to expect that you could give us a line on the corpse?—For purposes of identification, I mean.”

  “It is unlikely, Inspector; but if anything strikes me about her you shall know it.”

  “You can’t say fairer than that, ma’am. We’re keeping her as long as we can, in case any evidence of identification should turn up, but we can’t keep her out after Saturday. Even that’s stretching it a bit.”

  Mrs. Bradley did not ask for an elucidation of this statement, but went with her guide to the mortuary.

  “Here’s what she was wearing, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Bradley looked at the cheap and tawdry clothing, the worthless jewellery, the almost complete absence of underclothing, the high-heeled shoes and cobweb stockings, and then turned to look at the body from which these poor lendings had come.

  “Advanced stage of pulmonary tuberculosis,” she said. “Not much doubt how she made her living, either, Inspector. There are various indications.…”

  “So we’ve been told, ma’am. But whatever may be the truth about that, she was murdered, without a doubt, and by somebody who knew something about where to stick a knife.”

  “A knife. Yes. A sailor’s knife, now.…”

  “That might give us a line, ma’am. She must have been decoyed to that bungalow, for there’s not a stick of furniture in it. We’ve been on to the agents. It hasn’t been let these twelve years. Got a bad reputation.”

  “It will have a worse one now,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I should get on to Scotland Yard, Inspector. You will have noticed the London tab-marks on frock and coat, and the London bus ticket in the handbag. There’s so much water round here that a victim could be conveyed all the way from Great Yarmouth by river, and there’s nothing to say that she couldn’t be brought from London to Yarmouth in a boat.”

  “Nothing at all, ma’am. I’ll get the Chief Constable in on that idea. Meanwhile, you’d like to see the young ladies. They might have information that they’d part with to you, you knowing them in a kind of school-marm way. If they should spill anything, ma’am.…”

  Mrs. Bradley no
dded, but she was puzzled. From the nature of the wound, which had three rather curious little puncture marks around it, as though there had been some doubt in the mind of the person holding the knife as to which was the exact spot at which to strike, she would have said that there was at least as much evidence for suicide as for murder. But the substitution of the snake, and the disappearance of the weapon must be held to be conclusive, she supposed.

  • CHAPTER 6 •

  “Let’s go on with the game,” the Queen said to Alice; and Alice was too much frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her back to the croquet ground.

  —From Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

  South Walsham Broad is in two parts joined by a short stream. Mrs. Bradley, having driven from Norwich in her own car, had come by a secondary road through the little village of Rockheath Corner and round by the hamlet of Panxworth into South Walsham. Here she was informed, after enquiry at the post-office, that at the south-western approach to the village was a side road which crossed a stream which ran into a sizeable pond. On the opposite side of the pond, a little farther on, there was a school, and just before she reached the school she would find a lane which would take her on to the verge of South Walsham larger Broad. As this Broad was private, however, except for sailing and cruising, and they were looking for friends, it might be better to continue on their way through the village, turn left and then left again at Pilson Green, and come to the margin of the smaller Broad.

  The united intelligence of George the chauffeur and of Mrs. Bradley herself contrived to make sufficient of all this to bring them within sight of the smaller Broad. Bidding George find a suitable place to park the car, Mrs. Bradley set off on foot in search of the students and their cruiser.

  Knowing Laura Menzies sufficiently well to realise that if she had told the police (or anyone else) that she would be on South Walsham Broad that day, that was where she would be found, Mrs. Bradley unslung the field-glasses she had brought with her, and inspected the stretch of water.

  It was not difficult to find the Dithyramb. She was moored close to the bank not more than fifty yards from where Mrs. Bradley had got out of the car.

  Laura was alone. She was seated on deck with a book, her long legs sprawling, her feet on the cruiser’s gunwale, a bag of sweets by her side. Mrs. Bradley hailed her. The reader straightened her back and almost sent the book and the sweets flying onto the bank.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” she said, when she had helped Mrs. Bradley (redundant courtesy!) aboard the cruiser, and had invited her to sit down on the cabin roof. “We have had a time! What with the body and the police and having to give a timetable of our movements so that we simply can’t stir a step without feeling like ticket-of-leave men! It’s absolutely ruined the holiday. I didn’t want young Alice to write. It didn’t seem fair. But I’m jolly glad she did now. It’s awfully decent of you. I suppose you want to know all about it.”

  “Where are the others?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  “Gone to have a look at Saint Benet’s Abbey. They’re going to stay to tea. I’m not expecting them back very much before eight, I’m afraid. Still, I could tell you anything you wanted to know.”

  “What I want, as well as to hear what you can tell me, is a sight of the bungalow. I have the permission of the police. I suppose it is still being guarded?”

  “I wouldn’t know. All I know is that the inspector quite decently agreed that any two of us could go off at a time, so long as he knew how to get in touch with one of us. Still, it’s messed things up a bit. It means that the three of us can’t go off together, and there are heaps of things to see and places to visit.”

  “Have patience. We may be able to lift the embargo soon. At any rate, I’ll do my best for you. Now I have permission from the inspector for you to leave this Broad, if you yourself have no objection, in order that you may take me on a personally-conducted tour. Have you any objection?”

  “Not in the least. It won’t take us long to get there in the cruiser. Weren’t we lucky to get her? We’re only paying a pound a week each for the hire. That’s not much more than a quarter of what she’d cost at this time of year if we’d hired in the ordinary way.”

  Taken over the cruiser, Mrs. Bradley expressed admiration of everything she was shown, accepted a cup of tea, and then Laura started the engine.

  “We’ve got plenty of petrol,” she said.

  She took the cruiser along Fleet Dyke and up the western arm of the U-shaped bend in the River Bure, which encloses Ward Marsh. Then they ran past the conjunction of the Ant and the Bure, followed the bends and windings of the latter river, and came soon to the staithe up which lay the tiny Broad they sought.

  “This is the first opening,” said Laura. “We came up it for peace and quiet. We’re thinking of lying hove-to in the middle of Wroxham or Ranworth Broad next time we come this way!”

  She took the cruise, with a turn at right angles, into a smaller staithe, and then branched off to the left. The tiny Broad swelled out. Mrs. Bradley first noticed the woods, and Laura made straight towards them. She leapt ashore, held out a hand to Mrs. Bradley, and together they set out through the trees.

  A policeman was on duty at the bungalow. He read, very slowly and carefully, Mrs. Bradley’s official permit, then saluted and let them go in. There followed an almost silent twenty minutes, whilst Mrs. Bradley, having been shown by Laura the kitchen and the exact position in which the body had been found, turned to and explored with zeal the rest of the building.

  “Do they know who she was?” asked Laura when Mrs. Bradley, straightening her back, announced that there was nothing else to be done.

  “No, child; at least, not yet. The general inference is that she had been decoyed here. The police found no clothes nor baggage which would suggest that she lived in the place, and, as we have seen, the rooms are not carpeted or furnished, and one of the bedroom floors is ruinous. In fact, the whole building is rapidly falling to pieces.”

  “Yes; horrible place,” said Laura. “I suppose this is the sitting-room?” She gave it another glance. The one armchair had no seat worth calling such, and was worm-eaten, rotted, and showed rusty springs through all that remained of its upholstery. The window was thick with cobwebs. The floor, however, had not only been swept but scrubbed, and was in better condition than any other floor in the place with the possible exception of the kitchen.

  Even in this room, however, there were rat-holes in the wainscoting and the planking, and Mrs. Bradley, poking inquisitively up the chimney with a stick she had brought in from outside, brought down a bird’s nest, dusty and obviously some seasons old, yet showing no traces of soot.

  “Nobody here in the winter for years,” said Laura. “I—I felt the weapon in the wound, you know,” she added, “when I tried to find out whether she was dead. Couldn’t it have been suicide, on that?”

  “Yes, if you had really felt a weapon; but the police don’t think you did.” She described the viper made of worsted, which had been thrust down into the wound. Laura grimaced.

  “How beastly!”

  “Yes, it was. None of you picked up anything which could possibly have been a weapon, of course?”

  “We’ve been asked by the police about that. There was nothing at all. Of course, we didn’t go anywhere in the place except just inside the kitchen door, and she wasn’t killed in the kitchen. I mean, all that scrubbing. That was to take out the bloodstains. Must have been, don’t you think?”

  Mrs. Bradley did not commit herself on this point. Certainly there were reddish stains on the floor, but she did not think they were blood. However, it would be for the police experts, as she pointed out to Laura, to decide just what had been scrubbed off the only sound floor in the house.

  “If it was murder, you’d almost think the weapon would have been left in the wound to make it look like suicide, wouldn’t you?” Laura continued. “Oh, no, of course not, unless you could get the murdered person’s prints on
the hilt and not your own. And then they’d have to be in exactly the right place, wouldn’t they?”

  Mrs. Bradley agreed, and suggested that, as there seemed nothing more to be done in the bungalow at the time, they should return to the shore of the Broad. As soon as they had left the screen of trees, Laura observed that this time the cruiser had not been moved.

  “We felt a bit funny, I can tell you,” she said, “when we got back here last time and saw the Dithyramb stuck out there in the middle.”

  “I have no doubt about it,” Mrs. Bradley responded. “It must have been a shock, after finding the body.”

  “You’ve said it,” Laura agreed.

  “It was certainly rather rash of you to swim out to it. I suppose you saw nothing else to do.”

  “I still don’t see anything else I could have done.”

  “It was certainly very brave.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. I jolly well hoped that if there was a man—the murderer, you know—on board, he hadn’t got a gun. That was my chief thought all the time I was swimming out.”

  “Exactly where was this dinghy, the first time you saw it?”

  Laura went to the spot.

  “It was here. You can still just see where he drew it up in this soft patch near the clump of meadowsweet.” They both stood and looked at the scraped black earth. “He couldn’t have picked it up and carried it inland,” added Laura, “if that’s what you were thinking, but, of course, he could have shoved off again and crawled round the Broad and got out by the other channel. Come aboard again. I’ll show you.”

  They returned to the cruiser and left the Broad by means of the second entrance. Mrs. Bradley shook her head, but not, Laura thought, watching the sharp black eyes, in disagreement with the theory that the unknown man had used this way to get out of sight of the Dithyramb.

  “We have to remember,” said Mrs. Bradley, “that the dinghy was removed out of sight of the cruiser before you three girls went ashore. Then, after you had disappeared among the trees, the man (or men) came back to the cruiser, which was moored near the bank, I think you said, and took her out into the middle of the Broad. That seems such a curious little incident that I should very much like to find the explanation for it. Can you make any suggestion?”