Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

  Mrs. Bradley, whose contemporary, the grandmother, had been a militant suffragist leader for old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago, cackled harshly, and bestowed upon the ally the last cup out of the pot and the two scones still left on the dish. Gillian, who admitted to having had her tea, cleared the plate. Mrs. Bradley grinned approval.

  “And now,” she said, “we have to interview an Edinburgh landlady.”

  “She won’t mind. They’re used to the students, I expect,” replied Gillian philosophically. The landlady did, in fact, prove perfectly easy to interview, particularly when Mrs. Bradley claimed to be the young man’s maternal aunt, able and willing to pay his debts and for the damage done to the house.

  “Ye puir body,” said the landlady, at this. “He was braw laddie.”

  Although both elderly ladies were convinced that this was untrue, it formed a sympathetic bond, and Mrs. Bradley was able to inspect, as narrowly as she wished, the bedroom of her deceased nephew on her sister’s side, and to take stock of such of his effects as had been left untouched by a cyclone, it appeared.

  “There’ll be ane thing mair,” the guardian and custodian of the tall, narrow house said suddenly, when Mrs. Bradley’s close and detailed inspection was completed and the young man’s bills had been paid. “There’ll be a wee picture he was giving into my charge. It’s just a map.”

  She led Mrs. Bradley to the dark-walled bend of the stairs.

  “Ye wouldn’t just notice it,” she continued, “and, in my opinion, it’s a thing of very small value, but it belonged to him, and maybe ye’d care to take it away for a memento. It’s about all that got left, puir laddie, by the time those daft loons had finished wrecking his room. I dinna ken what way he set store by it.”

  “I’d very much like to have it,” Mrs. Bradley responded. The landlady reached up a long arm as tough as a Border reiver’s, and snatched the picture from the wall.

  “It’s no old,” she observed, as she gave it a hasty wipe over with her apron. “It’s nothing but a bit picture pulled out of a book.”

  “Good heavens!” said Gillian, amused. “It’s out of the Book Seven Piers Plowman. We used to have them at school.”

  “It’s written on, over to the back,” said the woman. “A bit verse, maybe, from Sir Walter Scott, I’m thinking.”

  The “verse” was a line or two from The Lay of the Last Minstrel:

  “Shone every pillar foliage-bound,

  And glimmered all the dead men’s mail.”

  “Will there be anything more for ye?” the woman enquired; and upon being informed that there was nothing more unless she could tell Mrs. Bradley the name and addresses of any friends the young man had had in Edinburgh, she showed them out very civilly. She had no more information to give.

  “He lived here four months, and nobody ever came near him. He would spend the most of his time just speiring about old books and family papers, and the like, in the second-hand booksellers, but got nothing, that I ken, for his pains.”

  “And his letters?”

  “Och, aye, his letters, to be sure! I mind, now you say it, that some of his letters came addressed to Graeme, but Carlisle was the name he wrote in my book, and Carlisle he always signed himself on cheques when he could get me to take his cheques, which wasn’t after the first two months of paying me, for the second cheque was a wrong one.”

  “Where did he bank? Perhaps I ought to see the manager. He may have had an overdraft. I want to see, poor fellow, that his effects are finally settled before I leave for London.”

  “Is it where did he bank? I dinna recollect the name of the bank, but I can point oot the way. I went there myself to speir about the cheque, ye ken. Look. If yell take the first turning by the kirk, and then bear round to your left, ye’ll be bound to see it.”

  They walked in that direction immediately her front door closed behind them.

  “What do you make of her?” asked Gillian.

  “Honest, and a hard woman,” Mrs. Bradley briskly replied.

  “Are you really going to the bank?”

  “No, child. I’m going to make a note of its name and address, though. We may perhaps need it later on.”

  As they came round by another road, and back on to Princes Street, she added:

  FIG. A: Bird’s-eye view of Edinburgh in the 17th century, showing the part enclosed within walls. (Reproduced by kind permission of George Philip & Son from Piers Plowman Histories Junior Book VII)

  A. The Castle. B. The Parliament House. C. The Market Cross. D. The City Walls. E. Maudlin Chapel. F. The Greyfriars’ Church and Churchyard. G. Heriot’s Hospital. H. The Weigh House. I. The Tron Kirk. K. The High Street. L. The Grassmarket. M. The Correction House. N. St. Giles’ Kirk. P. The Fish Market. Q. The West Port. R. The Society Port. S. The Potter-raw Port. T. The Lake. U. The Chapel in the Castle. W. The Tolbooth. Y. The Nether-bolb Port.

  “Don’t mention the Piers Plowman map to anyone, child. Don’t forget.”

  “I wasn’t going to. By the way, Aunt Adela, have you noticed one very curious thing about this business?”

  “I’ve noticed several, child. That is why, in spite of the fact that this business is anybody’s business but mine, I propose to ferret out the very last fact about it, if it proves to be the last thing I do.”

  “Attaboy!” observed her niece-by-courtesy, with marked approval. “But what I was going to point out—although evidently you don’t need to hear it—is how odd all the names are in this affair. Lancaster, that’s the old uncle—Devizes—that’s Geoffrey—”

  “And Joshua,” interpolated Mrs. Bradley.

  “Yes, and now this new one—Carlisle—they are all the names of towns. It seems queer to me. Do you think they can all be false?”

  “There seems reason to believe that the last one was false, child, anyhow.”

  “You think his real name was Graeme? Aunt Adela, why did you come to Edinburgh? Just to interview the landlady?”

  “A rich wedding to see,” said Mrs. Bradley absently. “I beg your pardon, child. I should have said ‘Shades of Baroness Orczy’—although not yet, I trust, bless her heart!”

  “Oh, I get it—‘damned elusive Pimpernel’—in this case the reason for Geoffrey’s disappearance and this boy—Graeme-Carlisle or Carlisle-Graeme—stabbing himself at almost the same time. I’m positive Geoffrey did it. How, otherwise, could it all have happened so oddly?”

  Mrs. Bradley made no reply to this, and they walked on until they came to a gunsmith’s.

  “We are,” Mrs. Bradley observed in a firm, low voice, “two weak, defenceless women. We will therefore arm ourselves. Can you, by any chance, manage a revolver, child?”

  “Good heavens, yes, I should hope so,” Gillian replied. They stopped at the gunsmith’s, and, after glancing rapidly at the window—or, rather, into it to obtain the reflection of two men who had been following them—Mrs. Bradley led the way into the shop.

  They spent a pleasant forty minutes—instructive ones for Gillian—in choosing the weapons, and by the time they left the shop the two men were gone. All the same, Mrs. Bradley hailed a taxi, bundled Gillian in, and off they drove to the hotel. One of the men, she thought, was not unlike the gamekeeper from the houses in the marshes. The other she did not know.

  Dinner was excellent, and as soon as it was over they went upstairs to the double room for which Mrs. Bradley had exchanged as soon as she knew that the girl was going to stay, and, each seated in an armchair away from the window, they discussed the case as far as it had gone.

  Mrs. Bradley wondered whether to mention the fact that she believed they had been followed. Gillian was practising whipping her revolver in and out. She looked absorbed, happy, and young. Mrs. Bradley decided to risk it.

  “Oh, them!” said the girl. “Yes, I saw them. I shall complain to the police if I see them hanging about again. They positively dogged our footsteps all the way from those lodgings. Silly apes! What did you do with the map?”


  “I have it here,” said Mrs. Bradley, taking it out and spreading it upon a small table by her bedside. Gillian came and looked over it.

  “Taken, I imagine, from the plan of Edinburgh published by de Witt in 1690,” Mrs. Bradley remarked. “I see that it had been torn or cut down the middle, and then—oh, no it hasn’t. There’s thickness, through. Something has been folded over, or joined.”

  “I can explain that, I think,” the girl remarked. “I remember that, in the book, the plan was in two halves, on two opposite pages. It used to irritate me a bit, because it left a wide white margin of page between the two halves of the map, so that you get—” she traced it delicately—”this letter K, which marks the High Street, separated from the rest of the High Street looking towards the Castle by an inch-wide strip of white paper. It made the plan seem not real. Of course, it was better to have the plan on a larger scale, I suppose—”

  She picked at the thickened paper as though to prise it up. Mrs. Bradley gently but firmly removed her hand, and said:

  “At any rate, somebody so far shared your objection to the way the plan was set out on opposite pages as to go to the trouble of folding the second sheet over and sticking it along that white margin to which you refer, and—you know, I think I’d like to see—”

  She did not finish the sentence, but, taking out a penknife with a very long thin blade, she began, with the most extreme delicacy and care, to separate the pages again.

  The sticking had not been done by an expert, and her precise handling of the knife began to have its effect. She worked very slowly indeed; so slowly, that Gillian suggested that wet warmth applied to the gum would take effect more quickly.

  “Like you steam open an envelope,” she suggested. Mrs. Bradley, however, preferred, as surgeons must, the knife, with its nicety of judgment. Her patience and skill were rewarded. Page one hundred and three fell back from one hundred and two, and, except for one obstinate sliver of paper which had elected to be sliced from the parent thickness rather than yield, the plan was in two perfect parts as the bookbinder and the printer, between them, had ordained that it should be.

  “Why, there’s something written,” said Gillian. “There’s the word Acrostic—beastly things!—and then some Latin. Oh, it looks like the beginning of a psalm.”

  “Of the fifty-first psalm,” amended Mrs. Bradley. “And that is interesting, too. It is the Criminals’ Psalm. It used to be read or repeated by criminals before their execution. Scott has a stanza about it:

  “And safer by none may thy errand be done,

  Than, noble dame, by me;

  Letter nor line know I never a one,

  Were’t my neck-verse at Hairibee.”

  “Hairibee?” said Gillian.

  “The place of execution, child, at Carlisle. Wait a minute. There’s more here, written small, and in ink not ten years old. Look. Here.”

  Gillian followed the yellow finger, and read aloud, like a child:

  “You will find me in title but not in deed of gift.”

  She looked up and said:

  “You’re not a Borderer, Aunt Adela?”

  “There is good Scots blood in me,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “But not a lot of it,” she added, with a cautiousness which appeared to give the amendment the lie. Gillian giggled, met a reproachful grimace, and subsided, elbows on the table, to brood again over the map.

  “Why should anybody take the trouble to write the first two words of a Psalm and then stick it down inside two pages like that? And that’s something legal, isn’t it—title, and deed of gift?”

  “Time will show, child. I wish I could be certain that we have now obtained possession of the only object for which the murderers were searching when they wrecked Mr. Graeme­Carlisle’s rooms.”

  “The murderers? You mean—Geoffrey—?”

  “And Mr. Joshua. That precious pair, I fancy—and, mind, it is nothing but fancy, for I can’t prove a word of what I’m saying—tracked down the man they afterwards murdered, made an appointment to meet him in Newcastle, and afterwards searched his rooms, but unsuccessfully.”

  “How do you work that out? You can’t know that they were after this plan.”

  “No. But one thing about it struck me as being a trifle odd. Why was it handed to the landlady?”

  “He hadn’t room for it on his walls.”

  “And yet a man wouldn’t trouble to frame a thing of this kind unless it had some particular interest for him. I should rather like to find out how long he had had it, and whether there were any conditions made at the time that he handed it over into the landlady’s care.”

  “He probably bought it framed and mounted, and then didn’t want it any longer.”

  “Nevertheless, I am interested in our Miserere mei, inscribed on the margin of a modern book. I am interested in the sticking together of the two pieces of the plan. I am interested in Mrs. Landlady—”

  “MacWhirter.”

  “MacWhirter, who minds her lodger’s business as well as her own, and who, in spite of a shrewd, and even suspicious temperament, accepted our bona-fides on sight and without investigation.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You look awfully like most people’s aunts and godmothers. I’d swallow you myself, without a blink, if I were a landlady, particularly if you were going to pay up old debts and so on. I mean, that puts the OK on any sort of snooping, I should say.”

  “I see. You may be right, but I’m thinking of paying another call on Mrs. MacWhirter—possibly tomorrow. And now—this plan. When we have scrutinised it a little more closely—for I perceive on it certain tiny arrows formed with Indian ink, and not, I venture to suppose, by the authors and printers of the book—we will post it to my friend the inspector at Newcastle.”

  Why?”

  “It will probably be among the exhibits passed round to the jury at the trial, child.”

  “You’re pretty sure it was murder, Aunt Adela, aren’t you?”

  “I am of the considered opinion that the murdered man was left-handed, child, that’s all. The development of the forearm muscles, the size of the left hand compared with the right, point to the facts that the dead man had been a manual worker and a left-handed manual worker. The point did not escape the police doctor nor the inspector, but they are content to abide their time.”

  “But I thought he was a schoolmaster.”

  “He had retired from that profession. We knew that from his landlady. Now, then, hand me my magnifying glass, and let us see what we can find.”

  The plan (Piers Plowman Histories, Junior Book Seven; by E. H. Spalding, M.A. and Phyllis Wragge. George Philip & Son, 1914.) was so clearly set out, and so fully annotated, that it was easy enough to follow the course of the arrows. They were very tiny, and, without the aid of the magnifying glass, which was a powerful one, they might easily have been mistaken for insignificant marks on the paper. The magnifying glass, however, showed them up for what they were—the track or trail leading from the West Port, just south of the Castle, along the Grassmarket, along a dog-leg street below the Castle Hill, round by the Weigh House, and so along the High Street to the Tolbooth.

  Here the arrow had a ring round it. The next arrow pointed eastwards, past St Giles’s, and the trail continued by way of the Market Cross and out at the Netherbolb, or Netherbow Port (the former spelling was given on the plan), out into Canongate. Here was sketched (only to be seen through the magnifying glass because it was so small and faintly drawn) a gallows on a raised platform. One thing more, which Mrs. Bradley noted and Gillian did not, was that the Tron Kirk, built, according to the annotation of the plan, in the ten years between 1637 and 1647, had been crossed out, having been shaded over very carefully and finely. The letter I, which indicated its position on the plan, had been crossed through.

  “Well, well,” said Mrs. Bradley, “we have learned what the plan has to tell us, so now to post it to Newcastle.”

  “Why not to London, Aunt Adela? It doesn’t tell anything ab
out the murder, does it?”

  “Be very careful, child, how you talk about murder. Suicide was the verdict, remember. We have not altered it yet.”

  “I mean suicide.”

  “And I think perhaps you are right about London. I will post the thing to my bankers. They will keep it safe. As you say, it has no significance, at present, with regard to its late owner’s death.”

  “Shall I slip down to the posting-box with it, Aunt Adela? There’s one in the vestibule.”

  “Very well, child, but I shall come with you. You will need, I imagine, armed escort.”

  She wrapped her revolver round with a small silk handkerchief so that only the little black muzzle was showing, and, after glancing both ways along the passage, she and Gillian walked to the head of the stairs. The posting-box was just inside the entrance hall. They reached it without encountering anybody on the stairs except a sandy-haired waiter who was carrying an empty tray. Against him, Mrs. Bradley clumsily and unpardonably cannoned, to send the tray spinning off towards the door of a room marked eight and the man himself almost head-first down the stairs.

  Waiting until she had seen Gillian shoot the hotel‑embossed envelope into the box, where it became, presumably, indistinguishable from several dozen others, except for its superscription, which would convey little to anybody who saw it since it was directed to the bank manager’s private address, Mrs. Bradley helped the man up, apologised earnestly to him, re-equipped him with his tray, tipped him, and followed Gillian upstairs.

  Throughout all these manoeuvres, the waiter, apparently dazed, had made no remark. He stood gazing at the money in his hand, and his lips moved, but not, Mrs. Bradley suspected, in thanks, or in words which any Scottish dialect might excuse.

  “That waiter is cursing both of us, I think,” said Gillian, when they had re-entered the bedroom. “He took a nasty toss.”

  “Yes, I meant he should,” said Mrs. Bradley calmly, “and I have been to the cinema far too many times now, I regret to say, not to know how to trip up people on the stairs.”