Brazen Tongue (Mrs. Bradley) Page 7

  “You don’t mean you’ll help us in the investigation, Mrs. Bradley?”

  “I love ferreting,” said Mrs. Bradley simply, “and I have always possessed the insatiable curiosity of the Elephant’s Child with, so far, no catastrophic results to myself. There are features of interest here which I cannot ignore. May I take it that the police will place no serious obstacles in the way of my researches?”

  “Oh, we’ll leave you alone all right,” said the young man, getting up. “If you want any facilities, ask for them. Only too glad to have you.”

  “What a thing it is,” said Mrs. Bradley, “to possess the right of the high, the low and the middle justice! Very well, Inspector. I go now to call upon the first of my material witnesses, the young journalist who was present with Sally at the Report Centre when Miss Fletcher was killed. I presume that the poison was in the coffee, and not in one of the cocktails which, my niece informs me, the poor girl drank at home before she reported for duty?”

  “We’re inclined to think the coffee, but arsenic takes longer to act on some people than on others. Of course, we’re not too sure about the woman who was drowned. That’s a funny case altogether. Still, it seems certain that all three deaths took place within twelve hours of one another. If so, and if my theory’s right, and the same chap did them all in, he must have had a pretty busy evening.”

  “All on the same day,” said Mrs. Bradley, thoughtfully. “And, you suspect, in the same twelve hours. A busy evening indeed. And now,” she added, more briskly, “I have to find some way of interviewing the people at the office of the local paper. I have tried once to approach the editor, and, through him, the young reporter who was present with Sally at the Report Centre when the telephonist was killed; but I was foiled by a man in shirt sleeves.”

  “That would be Buckley. Stout fellow, Buckley, but got it up his nose, rather, about the increased circulation of the paper, you know. Makes him very snooty. You’d be surprised.”

  “I shouldn’t. I have just had direct evidence of his snootiness.”

  “Take my card in with you.”

  “Cards,” said Mrs. Bradley, “mean nothing to the editor of the Record. No, I must get in off my own bat. I think of my sister-in-law, and I realise that she would assert herself. I cannot see any man in shirt sleeves keeping Selina away from the editor if she thought it desirable to interview him.”

  “Why are you so keen on seeing the editor?”

  “I want to get hold of a set of files of the paper for the past five years or so. But, most of all, I want to see Miss Mort. With her journalistic sense, she may have noticed things at the Report Centre that night which Sally missed.”

  She walked back to the newspaper office and went in again.

  “Where did you say I could find Miss Mort?” she said. Mr. Buckley had finished his writing, and was now turning over the contents of a box file.

  “Eh?” he said, “Oh, it’s you. The editor won’t see anybody. That’s honest.”

  “My name is Bradley—Lestrange Bradley,” said Mrs. Bradley benignly. “Take my card to the editor at once. I’m in a hurry.”

  “You can go up without bothering about cards,” said Mr. Buckley. “Besides, as I keep on saying, he wouldn’t see you. Pat might. What name did you say?”

  “Bradley,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Pray read it. It is all on the card.”

  “Bradley?” He tipped his hat farther backwards and looked at the card which at last she had induced him to take. “Bradley? Now where on earth—I get it! So you’re in it too, then, are you? My word, I can tell you,” he added, straightening his back, and then his hat, and becoming suddenly animated and pleasant, “it hasn’t half been a scoop for the Record! Got it long before the big London dailies. All due to Pat, you might say. Got a flair, that girl has! The boss and Mr. Eves have run seven Special Editions and a Digest since we first got the dope about Councillor Blackburn-Smith. Of course, the other two corpses don’t really matter so much. Smith was the big nose here, although the London papers seemed keener on that girl Fletcher. The A.R.P. tank corpse was only good for the Sunday papers really, but, boy! Would you say they ate it? Anyway, we printed every word young Pat could give us. Interviews with the people that found the other bodies, and a special article, Is it another ripper? Three we’ve had, you know. Three murders. Special interview with young Lillie Fletcher’s fiancé, photographed in his fire-fighting uniform; special interview with Miss Lestrange, daughter of Lady Selina Lestrange. That’s funny!” He glanced at the card in his hand. “No relation, I suppose?”

  “Why should you suppose that?” Mrs. Bradley enquired. She shot such an evil grin at him, and her expression held so much malignity, that he reached for the house-telephone and stated her name and business without more ado, in a husky voice unlike his previous pronouncements.

  “Go up, will you?” he said. “Second floor. Mind your head at the bend in the stairs.”

  • CHAPTER 7 •

  Telemachus is hurled into the sea by Mentor: the burning ship is seen on the extreme right.

  Description by Ewart Dudley of part of an early pictorial wall-paper.

  “I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” said the tall, fair-skinned young reporter, looking with great interest at Mrs. Bradley. “I could take you along, and show you where we found the poor girl, but it wouldn’t help much, would it? I mean, the police can do all that part; in fact, I think they have.”

  “What is your share in all this, Sally, my child?” asked Mrs. Bradley. Her niece, who was sitting by the window gazing sombrely into the street, turned her head. She was pale, Mrs. Bradley noticed, and looked fatigued.

  “Me? Oh, I was with Pat when we found her. I think you ought to interview her young man. That’s what the police keep doing, only he seems to have an alibi. At least, the other men back him up, and say he was with them all the time, and he says he doesn’t know of anybody who disliked the girl enough to kill her. But then, men will say anything. They know awfully little about girls.”

  Mrs. Bradley studied her niece closely. Sally flushed and then grinned. Pat, looking first at one of them and then at the other, laughed aloud.

  “Shall I take you to the Report Centre?” she enquired.

  “By all means, child,” Mrs. Bradley responded. “if you can spare the time. Did either of you know the girl well?”

  “Sally didn’t know her at all. I interviewed her father once. He’s a postman, and he grew the biggest vegetable marrow last year for the Show, so I was sent along by my editor.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “The postman? In Clarence Avenue. He has the house on a mortgage and pays the Council so much every month at five and a quarter per cent. It will take him another eight years to get the money paid off. The Council arranges for fifteen years, and he’s been there seven years last July. He moved in, in his summer holiday.”

  “This information is what he gave you when you interviewed him, I take it?”

  “Yes. I’ve a pretty good memory. I very seldom take notes. Come along, Sally. If Sir Ferdinand is there, you can get us in. They’re strict about having strangers in the Report Centre,” she added, for Mrs. Bradley’s information. The road was a busy one, but the narrow concrete-paved alley up which they turned at the end of the first block of shops was quiet and deserted, and their footfalls rang hollow as they traversed it.

  “We can’t go through the Report Centre unless we’ve got business there,” explained Pat again, walking ahead and speaking over her shoulder, “but we can get round this way if you don’t mind a bit of a squash, and then Sally can round up Sir Ferdinand if you want to go inside later on.”

  The narrowest place came just at the angle of the building, round which, it was clear, the architect had not intended that people should find room to walk.

  The three of them managed to squeeze past, and when they had done so they found themselves in a kind of gravelled courtyard surrounded on three sides by municipal buildings.
Yellow and copper-coloured leaves were in little heaps on the ground, as though eddying water rather than wind had whirled them where they lay. The trees from which they had fallen, not yet bare, stood, with the depressing, disciplined tidiness of nearly all municipal vegetation. in two rows at right-angles to one another, the one row screening the Town Hall stokehold, the other the Public Baths.

  “It was here,” said Pat, moving forward to the rockery.

  “I see,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And that gate?” She pointed to double doors wide enough to admit a lorry. They were at the western end of the stokehold wall which adjoined the Town Hall annexe.

  “Leads past the Baths laundry and on to a side road. Across the road is the Auxiliary Fire Station, where Fletcher’s boy was on duty the night she was killed, and about a quarter of a mile farther down the main road is the Fire Station itself. I don’t think there’s any connection between them, if you know what I mean. The auxiliary one is just simply A.R.P.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Bradley again, leading the way to the hole at the top of the rockery. “How long did the doctor think that the poor girl had been dead?”

  “I don’t know, because the inquest was adjourned.”

  “Surely they took the medical evidence?”

  “Did they? The inspector would know. It couldn’t have been long, though, could it?”

  “Where was the girl employed?”

  “Only here, at the Report Centre.”

  “And where, before the war?”

  “At the telephone exchange. It’s in Esk Avenue, the north past of the town.”

  “Did she leave voluntarily?”

  “I suppose so. I really don’t know. I suppose she thought she ought to do some A.R.P. work, that’s all. But perhaps I ought to tell you that there had been some funny business—we didn’t print anything—and, actually, I myself didn’t cover the case—but apparently it was all rather scandalous.”

  “Local scandal?”

  “Oh, yes. I don’t know much about it—practically nothing, in fact—but Mrs. Commy-Platt would know. She ran the Through Breath to Beauty group, where it all started, and, of course, Lillie Fletcher was her companion-secretary at the time.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes. I wish,” added Pat ingenuously, “that you would find out all about it. I must say I’d love to know.”

  Mrs. Bradley cackled.

  “Where does Mrs. Commy-Platt live?” she enquired, looking earnestly at the Town Hall clock, which could be seen above the adjacent buildings, and then glancing down at her watch.

  “In one of those big houses in Esk Avenue.”

  “Where the telephone exchange is, at which this poor girl was employed? Esk Avenue seems to be notorious.”

  “Oh, no, really, it isn’t! It’s a most respectable part of the town,” said Pat, alarmed. “And you mustn’t think that there’s anything odd at all about Mrs. Platt, because there isn’t. She’s just…well, you know what some of the leisured people in provincial towns are like! But, really, I’m sure she’s quite nice.”

  “I am glad to hear it. Conduct me to Mrs. Platt, child. She seems to be our line of approach to Lillie Fletcher.”

  “I’m not coming, then,” said Sally. “I promised mother that, whatever happened, I should be home to lunch. Ferdinand is coming,” she added; but whether this last sentence was intended as an inducement to Ferdinand’s mother to join the party, or as a threat to keep her away from it, Mrs. Bradley could not decide. She turned to the young reporter.

  “Would you like your lunch, child?”

  “Yes,” said Pat, with simple candour. “Thank you very much.”

  “Very well. By the way, was there very much blood on the sides of this rockery?”

  “No. I expect it washed out in the rain. It was fearfully wet, on and off, if you remember. The stone was pretty bloody, I believe, but, of course, the messy side was against the ground, and the rain didn’t very much affect it.”

  Mrs. Bradley, always charmed by the society of the young, then carted her off to the “Dragon” and sent the pot-boy, whom she discovered teasing the garage cat, to look for George and tell him to get his lunch. She had her own methods of description, and the pot-boy discovered George without difficulty.

  “And now,” said Mrs. Bradley, removing a scarf in peculiarly repulsive shades of oyster, dusty pink and what used to be called, in children’s paint-boxes, green bice, “what shall we have?”

  It was a pleasant meal. Mrs. Bradley finished up with cheese, which Pat declined, and Pat with a cigarette. Both had coffee, the worst part of the meal (but not as bad, Mrs. Bradley observed, as she had drunk in Alsace-Lorraine), and then they began to talk.

  “First,” said Mrs. Bradley, knowing how extremely difficult it is for the female young, with the memory of their schooldays still upon them, to avoid answering a direct question, “what is the matter with Sally?”

  “Oh, well…is there anything?” asked Pat, hedging bravely. Mrs. Bradley said nothing, but waited, her black eyes fixed on Pat’s face, and a slight smile, sensed rather than seen, at the corners of her beaky little mouth. Pat, a few years previously, would have wriggled beneath the gaze. The dignity of twenty summers (she had been born in June) forbade that primitive reaction to acute mental discomfort, but she flushed a little, the blush showing clearly under the very fair skin, and said hesitatingly:

  “Well, you’re her aunt, and she likes you. She’s in love, I think.”

  “With the inspector in charge of the case?” asked Mrs. Bradley, who had a shrewd and happy appreciation of her niece’s instinctive behaviour.

  “She’s told you?”

  “No, child.”

  “How do you know? Surely, Lady Selina…?”

  Mrs. Bradley shook her head, and grinned.

  “And I suppose these cases are most unsatisfactory,” she remarked. “Has he tackled a murder before?”

  “He’s a Hendon boy,” observed Pat, as though she were explaining away some rather embarrassing point in connection with the affair.

  “All the same,” Mrs. Bradley solemnly subjoined, “I don’t think Selina would like it. What has gone wrong with the case?”

  “He says the other corpses are connected, and nobody else thinks they are.”

  “The body in the tank and the murdered Councillor?”

  “Yes. Have you read them up? Personally, I think he’s quite right, and I’d like to say so in the paper. In fact, I did say so in my column last week, only my editor pencilled it out, and said we should be had up for malicious libel or contempt of court or something. But he’s only scared because, as you say, one of the corpses was a Town Councillor. Someone poisoned him, and then propped him up in a doorway in the black-out, and he was found by two people who were waiting for a bus to take them home from the pictures. Ronald tried to put it on to them, the silly ass!”

  “And how long had the Councillor been dead?”

  “Well, he was stiff. So stiff that he fell down flat when the young man touched him. But the doctors didn’t seem anxious to commit themselves as to the time of death. He had a funny inside or something, and they think perhaps it might have made a difference.”

  “Oh, had he?” said Mrs. Bradley. “Who was his doctor?”

  “Doctor Forrest. He lives in Mount Park Avenue. But, of course, it was the police doctor who was first upon the scene when the body was found.”

  “And the other corpse?”

  “The other corpse? Well, that really is a mystery. The body hasn’t been identified.”

  “Oh?”

  “No. The body in the tank, you know. She was about fifty, they think. She was drowned all right, and she hadn’t taken arsenic, whereas Councillor Smith and Lillie Fletcher both had.”

  “Very interesting indeed. And nobody knows anything about her, except that she wasn’t dressed in her own clothes. How did the inspector know that?”

  “I believe the things she had on have been recognised and identified as
some which once belonged to Mrs. Commy-Platt. Mrs. Platt belongs to all sorts of charitable organisations, and she gives away her old clothes to some of them. But I don’t see how you knew they weren’t the woman’s own clothes, and in any case it was only a night-gown and a pair of pink flannel drawers.”

  “Mrs. Commy-Platt is vaguely reminiscent of Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite, is she not? I think I shall be interested in meeting Mrs. Platt. Let us see whether we can induce the waiter to produce the bill,” said Mrs. Bradley, ignoring, except with a grin, the tribute to her perspicacity.

  “It’s a fairly long way from here,” said Pat, as they came out into the street. She surveyed her companion’s small and apparently frail figure. “Wouldn’t you like a bus, or perhaps your car, if you’ve any petrol?”

  “How far?”

  “A mile and a half, I should think. And most of it uphill.”

  “Can you walk a mile and a half uphill?” Pat laughed, and they crossed the High Street, took a narrow turning which the girl promised was a short cut, and soon came out upon a small common on which a few seats had been erected at public expense and a printed notice put up on a bright green post. A narrow path, discreetly asphalted, led to the other side of the open space, and then came a gradually mounting, winding road, cut through what seemed to have been woodland, for there were forest trees, including oaks and pines, in the gardens of all the houses.

  “Mrs. Platt lives almost at the top. There’s a wonderful view,” said Pat, “from her upstairs windows. I stayed the night once, two years ago, when it was terribly foggy. I had gone to interview her about the portrait of her father which she was presenting to the Town Hall for the Watch Committee Jubilee, and she wouldn’t hear of my trying to get back to my digs. Said it might be dangerous, and anyway would take me hours.”

  “And what is your candid opinion of Mrs. Platt?”

  “I think she’s just a well-meaning old busybody, really. Of course, she thinks she owns the town, and she’s so well-off and such a difficult person to sort of sit on, that everybody lets her go on thinking so. Here’s the telephone exchange, where the poor girl Fletcher used to be employed.”