Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “Let us go to my room—I have engaged a room here—and I will explain what I can. Your Mr. Geoffrey is not staying here, I imagine?”

  “He was, but he said that if there was a chance of our being engaged later on, it would be better for him to leave. I thought it showed strength of character.”

  “I am sure it did,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I don’t suppose for one moment that Mr. Geoffrey wants you to know what he does with himself all the time.”

  They went up in the lift, although Mrs. Bradley’s room was on the first floor of the hotel.

  “I am afraid of stairs,” she said, grinning.

  “Oh—Freud! I thought that was old stuff now,” said Gillian.

  “Not Freud,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Fortunately,” she added, when they were seated in armchairs by the window, which was a wide and handsome bay, “I have a patient in Newcastle—an ex-patient, I should say—who has often suggested that I should visit her. I shall call at her house—it is out on the Otterburn Road—as soon as I have finished with Mr. Geoffrey.”

  “Tell me about your discoveries, Aunt Adela, please. And tell me why Geoffrey is suspected. I can’t believe it of him—he seems so very truthful and sensible, and, really, I rather like him, I ought to tell you.”

  “Someone has been plumming him up, if he is truthful,” Mrs. Bradley pointed out, “and if he were sensible, this would not have been possible by the crude methods which, so far, in this case, are being employed. Take your choice, child. He may be either truthful or sensible, but, even at this extremely early stage of the investigation, it is very difficult to see how he can be both.”

  “Truthful, then,” said Gillian.

  “Right,” Mrs. Bradley answered. “We will begin with the assumption that he is truthful, and see how far that leads us. When are you meeting him next?”

  “This evening, I’m afraid.”

  “Do not say that. Nothing could be better. When he is at his best, ask him to take you to visit this dying uncle of his. I want you to notice and remember the words of his reply. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And you will?”

  “Yes, I will. I’m sure he has told the truth, so far as he knows it.”

  “In that case, his sudden appearance among them should startle the conspirators into a fit,” said Mrs. Bradley. Gillian stared at her, but the brilliant black eyes gave nothing away, and the beaky little mouth was pursed frighteningly. Mrs. Bradley looked like a bird of prey. She stared at Gillian for a minute, and when she spoke her words conveyed nothing to the girl.

  “There were three ravens sat on a tree,

  They were as black as they might be.

  The one of them said to his make,

  ‘Where shall we our breakfast take?’ ”

  Gillian laid a hand on the yellow-sleeved, thin, old arm.

  “You think there’s dirty work going on, Aunt Adela, don’t you? But so does Geoffrey, you know. That’s why he wanted someone to take up the case and investigate his uncle’s illnesses. He’ll be ever so pleased to know you are going to do it. I know he will.”

  “I know he will, too,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  Mrs. Bradley dined alone, for Gillian was first dining with Geoffrey and then was going with him to the local music hall. She left the hotel at half-past six. The “second house” was at nine, and this was the performance for which their seats had been booked.

  It occurred to Mrs. Bradley that an evening spent at the Hippodrome would be preferable, in some respects, to one spent alone in the hotel, and so, at 7.35 precisely, ten minutes before she had her dinner, she called up the music hall and asked for a seat. She had to give her name and the name of the hotel, and secured a good seat in the front row of the dress circle. Gillian and Geoffrey, she knew, had booked two stalls. At half-past eight she drove off in a taxi, and was in her seat, studying the programme, at twelve minutes to nine.

  She had looked carefully at all the people in the stalls the moment she took her place, but Gillian and Geoffrey had not then arrived. They came in at about four minutes to nine, however, just as the orchestra had begun to take their places, and Mrs. Bradley watched them settle into their seats in the fourth row.

  She took no further notice of them after that, for almost immediately the lights were lowered, the orchestra struck up, the fire-curtain, a depressing view of Windsor Castle by moonlight, was raised, the curtains behind it parted and, as soon as the orchestra had finished, the first act was on.

  Mrs. Bradley, in common with most philosophical human beings, held that, although to obtain the maximum of entertainment from any music-hall performance one had to be in the right mood and, she rather thought, in company with friends whose temperaments were equally attuned to the rarefied atmosphere of Variety, it was always possible, granted that one was experiencing neither pain, sorrow, nor serious worry at the time, thoroughly to enjoy any vaudeville programme, good, bad, or indifferent.

  This philosophy she was effectually realising, when, at the end of the third item, there was a noticeable scuffling down below on the floor of the house. This disturbance was followed by some audible North-country protests, and then the house lights went up, the curtains came together, and the manager stepped out through a flashing central aperture and asked, in the tones of a man trying to make his voice heard above the roar of Niagara, whether there was a doctor in the house.

  Mrs. Bradley had begun to get out of her seat—with some difficulty due to the small space at her disposal between the front edge of the balcony and the bodies of the people in her row—when she was addressed by an agitated, breathless, white-faced Gillian. The girl seemed unable to express herself clearly at first. She was suffering from shock, there was no doubt.

  “Aunt Adela! Do come. They say it’s Geoffrey. He’s been stabbed! I’m afraid it’s—I’m afraid it’s serious.”

  “So he’s truthful but not sensible,” said Mrs. Bradley. Nevertheless, she could not believe that this was so. She herself considered him neither. Gillian’s observation that he might be a bit of a heel (made suddenly and ingenuously at the tea-table) she herself amended to the thought that, so far as Mr. Joshua was concerned, he might possibly prove to be Achilles’ heel.

  There was no doubt but that Mr. Joshua had made the appointment at her London house merely to size her up. It would be his bad luck, were any villainy toward, that Gillian (Mr. Geoffrey’s innocent witness to the incredible story he had told her) should have brought into the case not only an expert in morbid psychology but an amateur of crime.

  • CHAPTER 4 •

  “ ‘O ye take my riches to Bee Ho’m.

  And deal them presentlie

  To the young that canna, the auld that maunna,

  And the blind that does not see.’ ”

  Mrs. Bradley and Gillian had reached the ground floor and were walking, after a murmured word to one of the programme girls, along the left aisle of the stalls, before the performance was resumed.

  From the front of the house a short passage led to the stage and also to a door through which they passed. They were met by a man with a beard.

  “We brought him in by the stage door,” he explained in a whisper. “He’s in the acrobats’ dressing-room, they not having to come in yet, owing to being the last item on the bill.”

  They continued to follow this informant and soon reached a dingy but brilliantly lighted dressing-room in which was a small group of people. One of these, who was in evening dress, turned out to be the manager. At least three of the others, two men and a woman, were doctors, Mrs. Bradley surmised. A fat little Jew, still another doctor, it seemed, was on his knees by the body. Mrs. Bradley heard Gillian make a little choking sound, and suggested that she should sit at the further side of the room and not worry.

  At the sound of her voice the manager turned round. He spoke with a slight American accent.

  “I
guess we’ve gotten assistance, thank you, Doctor,” he said.

  “Yes, but I think I may know the young man,” said Mrs. Bradley. She walked round the body via its feet, and watched the little Jew. He lifted his black eyes to her, squatted back on his heels so that his plump thighs seemed ready to burst from his trousers, and said, with a slight but pleasant lisp:

  “I’m sorry, Doctor. I hope he was no relation?”

  “No relation,” replied Mrs. Bradley. She, too, knelt down beside the body, but opposite the other doctor. “Dear, dear! Very bad, very bad.”

  “Not a lot of blood. It was a very clean, quick work, this,” said the little Jew.

  “Dead?” said the manager. “Heck! We’ll have to call up the police.”

  “Yes, do,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Tell them, when they come, that his name is Geoffrey Devizes, and that his uncle lives…”

  There was a shriek from Gillian. The door slammed. The Jewish doctor felt the top of his head, and smiled. Mrs. Bradley went over to the opposite wall, and, taking a piece of coloured chalk from her pocket, made a ring round the spot where the bullet had pitted the plaster.

  “It was one of those other doctors! The woman doctor!” cried Gillian.

  Gillian went to her room that night in a state of mind to which she had long been a stranger. She could have fancied that the shadowy man seen by the housekeeper, stood, a darker shade, against her shadowy curtains; that beneath her window walked a ghostly groom in conversation with a cut-throat gamekeeper. But when, nerving herself to get out of bed, she walked over to the dressing-table, the shadow was only the shadow of two heavy, narrow curtains against a background of broader, thinner ones; the two men walking below were only a couple of drunks turned out of a public-house at closing time. She made a face at her own vague shadow in the mirror, and went to bed again.

  She dreamt of green bottles and of purple ones; of a rose window in a church she had known in her childhood; of the Five Sisters of York Minster; of a window at home which had a coat of arms in it.

  Mrs. Bradley, who had had no dreams, rose very early next morning and went out for a walk before breakfast. She was thinking again about the house in the marshes. There were two people (according to Mr. Joshua’s story) whom she had not seen when she visited there. One was the Irish groom and the other the penniless niece. She was inclined to think, with the farmer who would not believe in the giraffe, that there weren’t no such animals. But it did not do to be too sure, particularly as, to her, the house already had the heavy compelling horror, yet utter incredibility, of a nightmare. As an equally fascinating side of the investigation, she went over in her mind the events of the previous evening. Who, she wondered, and where, was the woman who had fired the shot across the dead youth’s body?

  She wondered, also, for whom the shot had been intended. It seemed that it must have been aimed either at herself or at the little Jewish doctor. At that moment she had been speaking, she remembered. She had mentioned Mr. Geoffrey’s name and she had been going to mention the house in the marshes. Was it that someone was sensitive enough not to wish Mr. Geoffrey’s name or his (alleged) uncle’s address broadcast? On the other hand, the shot might not have had any connection with her remarks at all.

  There were two other puzzles, which she could not solve. One was the effect of the young man’s death on Gillian. The girl had had a shock, it was true; but it was not the shock of personal terror or loss. The young man might have been a stranger, from the way that the girl had behaved and spoken, after the first panic was over.

  Then there remained the nagging little question of how it was that Gillian had known exactly where to come and find her at the music-hall on the previous evening. She could come to no conclusion about this, and decided that she would ask the girl about it as soon as she returned to the hotel.

  She got back from her walk before nine, and found Gillian still in bed.

  “Get up, lazybones!” said Mrs. Bradley. “And come along down to your breakfast.”

  “Oh, Aunt Adela! Isn’t it beastly! I’ve got to go and identify the body, and I’m sure I can’t,” said Gillian, looking fresh and pretty. “And I’ve had such beastly dreams!”

  “There is a good deal I’m still in the dark about,” said Mrs. Bradley, sitting in Gillian’s armchair. “Do you feel able to enlighten me?”

  “Why, of course, Aunt Adela. But you ought to go back to London. I’m sure you were shot at last night. What a mercy the woman couldn’t aim straight! I saw the gun. A beastly little black thing. She had it in her coat pocket and whipped it out, and fired, and was off like a shot herself.”

  “He had it in his coat pocket,” amended Mrs. Bradley. “I think, child, that our inefficient friend is the poor Mr. Joshua of the story. And that’s another interesting point. He and Mr. Geoffrey were supposed to be cousins, weren’t they? Did you gather whether they got on well together?”

  “Well, Geoffrey didn’t sound malicious about Joshua when he told the story; and it did seem as though Joshua must have consulted him about the way things were happening to their uncle; and, the queerest thing of all, there was no suggestion that the uncle was a bit—well—how shall I put it?— you know, batsy or anything.”

  “I noticed that particularly,” said Mrs. Bradley. “In fact, in the story, he was a hale and hearty old gentleman who was accustomed to travelling every day to his business to keep an eye on it; he was capable of kicking his groom in what can only be called a full-blooded, eighteenth-century manner, and he gave parties for his relations if he liked them, and turned them out of doors if he did not—behaviour, in every case, which, partly by reason of its sheer un-Christianity, would be accepted as sane and normal by the majority of people everywhere.”

  “You sound like the conclusion of the Children’s Hour,” said Gillian flippantly. Then she added soberly: “What do you make of it all, Aunt Adela?”

  “What do you, child?”

  “Nothing. I think I’d like to go back to London, and I think I’d like to forget all about the beastly story. I wish I’d never met Geoffrey and I certainly wish I’d never got mixed up in his affairs. I shall never get over having mixed you up in them, that’s another thing. I’m really terribly sorry it’s all being such a nuisance.”

  Mrs. Bradley cackled.

  “There’s one more thing I wish you’d explain to me,” she said. “I know, from what the police were told last night, and from what the manager said, that Mr. Geoffrey was not in his seat in the auditorium when he was stabbed. On the other hand, it was not the interval in the performance, so why had he left you, and where had he said he was going?”

  “He said he hadn’t any cigarettes and could not sit through a performance without smoking. He apologised, but said it really was just like hell to him if he couldn’t smoke when he wanted to, so that, if I would excuse him…So, of course, I did, and off he went. That was almost as soon as the lights went down. He was gone an awfully long time, but I didn’t think anything of it, although I did think perhaps he could have got some in the bar. Well, just before the manager came on to the stage and asked if there was a doctor in the house, the man who had been sitting in the seat next to Geoffrey leaned over to me and said he’d just had a message that my ‘young man’ had met with an accident, and had given my name, and I was to go up to the dress circle front row, and fetch the old lady who was sitting there, because she was a doctor and would know exactly what to do.”

  “So that’s how you knew where to find me?”

  “Yes. Of course, I didn’t know it was you at first, and then, when the lights all came on, I saw you as soon as I began to walk down the gangway. But I can’t think how Geoffrey could have known you would be in the house.”

  “No, but we can easily find that out,” said Mrs. Bradley. After breakfast she went to the advance booking office of the music-hall, and came directly to the point.

  “I am very anxious to have a description of the man who asked for the number of my seat in the house
at last night’s second performance. My name is Bradley,” she said. “I booked my seat by telephone last evening.”

  “We do take the name and address of telephone bookings,” said the clerk. “Bradley? From the ‘Dillinger’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dress Circle A twenty-one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Young fellow came in about eight and asked for it specially. I had to tell him it had gone. He said he wanted it for his aunt, name of Bradley. I said that was the lady’s name who had booked it. He said that was all right, then, and went off whistling.”

  “A tall dark young man, of course?”

  “That’s right,” replied the clerk, who appeared to have strayed north from Shoreditch. Mrs. Bradley added another leading question.

  “Accompanied by a small, reddish-haired man, somewhat older?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the conversation did not seem to you at all strange?”

  “Who, me?”

  “Yes. Do people often come and make these rather odd requests at the box-office?”

  “We get all sorts. A man wanted to book three seats for self and two chimps the other day. In fact, he did book them. Then the management threw out the chimps.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Not ’arf. Then the man went, too, and claimed his money back.”

  “He got it?”

  “No. Nobody getting thrown out of a music ’all gets their money back. One of the Queensberry rules, that is. You’d have no check on anybody’s behaviour, you see, and behaviour’s everythink in a music ’all, especially in the first ’ouse, which is what it was.”

  “I see. Thank you very much,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  She took her leave, frowning thoughtfully.

  “Well?” said Gillian, when she got back to the hotel.

  “Geoffrey and Joshua were together yesterday evening, after Geoffrey took you out to dinner. At what time did he leave you?”

  “He didn’t leave me.”

  “Don’t be tiresome, child.”