Here Comes a Chopper (21 page)

‘Yes, but I kept my dressing-gown on when I came back to bed. I was frozen, and it seemed quite the best thing to do.’

‘So it was. Look here, you’d better have breakfast in bed, and make sure you’re not going to catch cold.’

‘If I’m going to catch cold, I’ve caught it. I don’t want to stay in bed. If there’s going to be fun I want my share of it.’

‘You’ll do as you’re told. It won’t hurt you for once, I suppose?’ said Laura, looking belligerent.

‘No,’ said Dorothy, meekly snuggling down. Laura regarded her intently, and then continued:

‘Well, I should think they’ve shot their bolt. You didn’t get any inkling as to the identity of the gentleman sportsman who put you in the car, I suppose? I know you said you couldn’t see his face, but——’

‘I’m almost certain I’ve heard his voice before, but I can’t remember where. Except for that, and beyond the fact that he was pretty big—long-armed and broad—and was very gentle—most annoying! He behaved as though I were about two years old—I couldn’t tell you another thing about him.’

‘It wasn’t the chauffeur, Sim?’

‘Oh, no, not the chauffeur Sim!’

‘Are you positive?’

‘Absolutely. Sim is fairly broad, but I shouldn’t think he’s a quarter as strong as this man. No, it wasn’t a bit like Sim. He was really rather nice, although it irritates me to admit it.’

‘I see. Very odd. You don’t feel all nerves? Or do you?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Well, I don’t know so much about that,’ said Laura, getting up. ‘For a delicately nurtured child who has been apprehended and gagged by thugs, and incarcerated in a garaged car at dead of night, you take things pretty coolly.’

‘There’s no other way to take them,’ said Dorothy. Laura went downstairs and found Mrs Bradley at breakfast.

As soon as the sun was fairly up, Laura went out to investigate. She had been correct in her surmises. Wires had been fixed across the stable entrance and the side gate as well as the front gate by which she and Roger had entered. She had come out armed with a pair of wire-cutting
pliers and soon removed the obstacles. Then she went round to the stables and had a look at the garage, but did not go in.

There was nothing much to be seen. Mrs Bradley had come back by car, so Laura called upon George, the chauffeur, who lived in a cottage adjacent to the house.

‘Is the young lady any the worse, Miss?’ enquired the chivalrous George.

‘I expect so, but you wouldn’t know it. That kid’s got pluck,’ replied Laura, regarding her own bandaged hands with pensive satisfaction. ‘I got home on my bloke, George, and I shouldn’t wonder if Mr Hoskyn’s aggressor didn’t pretty nearly chew his own tongue off. It’s no joke being butted under the chin when you’re not anticipating same, and the said Hoskyn is by no means such a string-bean as he looks.’

‘Marked him, did you, miss?’ said George, betraying sober and congratulatory interest in Laura’s own exploits.

‘Yes, I believe so. I haven’t mentioned that to anyone else, so keep it under your hat. He didn’t tackle me squarely, and I tore out a chunk of his hair. I’ve got it as a souvenir in a little tin box upstairs. Heaven send it’s not lousy, that’s all. By the way, you did a good job, George. Sober but hearty congratulations and all that. We could not have foreseen the wire. Now, mind! Not a breath to either of them! Glad you could help.’

Upon this secret and sinister note Mrs Bradley’s henchmen parted. Laura returned to bed to make
up for the sleep she had lost, and all three young people remained within doors all day. Mrs Bradley showed herself in the afternoon, heard the whole story and clicked her tongue, but made, to the disappointment of her hearers, no particular comment. In response to a question from Dorothy, she reported that Claudia Denbies was as cheerful as might be expected. She left it at that, and then reverted to the events of the night.

‘Deduced that you would use the bloodhound; handled Dorothy as though she were a two-year-old child (except that one wouldn’t leave a two-year-old child to freeze to death in a car), and selected a young lady’s pyjama trousers to lay a false trail…. Ah, that paints a strange portrait,’ she said, with a sudden loud cackle.

‘Further to that,’ said Roger, who had been keeping this news-item up his sleeve all day, ‘somebody got into my room while we were gone and has made a great dent across the pillow, leaving a long, dirty mark.’

‘Shows how necessary our plot was,’ said Laura.

J
OHN
D
ONNE
,
Song

WEDNESDAY MORNING CAME
and with it an outburst of early rising at the Stone House. Célestine had everybody up at half-past six, Henri had breakfast—that, to his mind, almost lascivious English cooked breakfast which, in over twenty years of service, he had not been able to train Mrs Bradley to cease from offering her guests—on the table by a quarter past seven, and George, the chauffeur, had the car on the gravel at eight.

The inquest was called for ten o’clock, and
was held in the dining-room at Whiteledge. A nervous Roger, an interested but slightly anxious Dorothy, an urbane but unusually silent Captain Ranmore, a peevish but recognizably uninhibited Lady Catherine, an incredibly beautiful Claudia, a smart, silent Sim with an incongruous bit of sticking-plaster on his head, a dignified Bugle and an alert and birdlike Mrs Bradley were provided with seats, and the coroner sat without a jury.

‘This is not,’ said the coroner, a precise but apparently non-committal man, a local solicitor, ‘a court of justice but a court of enquiry. We are here to ask how a man came by his death. If any of the interested parties wishes to be legally represented, that can be permitted, but please to give your names distinctly so that I may write them in my notes.’

Roger’s eyes travelled to a tall, dark, beautifully tailored man who rose at once and said:

‘I represent Mrs Claudia Vesper, who is usually known as Claudia Denbies.’

‘Your name?’ enquired the coroner.

‘Alastair Charles MacAdam.’ Whilst the tall man was declaring himself, Roger noticed the inspector and the sergeant, who had seated themselves very unobtrusively at the end of his row. Whilst he was looking in their direction, another man got up and said that he was Algernon Bliss Simonds, and that he represented the railway company.

At this point the door of the courtroom opened, and three men were shown in. The coroner looked up sharply and asked:

‘Who are these people?’

‘The engine-driver, fireman and guard you called, sir,’ answered the policeman who had let the men in. The coroner looked at them severely, and motioned them to a bench.

‘Now perhaps we can proceed,’ he said. ‘Call Inspector Lucas.’

‘Waste of time,’ observed Lady Catherine. ‘We had all this before.’

The inspector gave evidence of having been called to see the body. The doctor who followed gave evidence that the man would seem to have been dead for between eight and twelve hours when he saw him, which was approximately at twelve noon on Good Friday morning.

‘Did you come to any conclusion as to the cause of death?’ enquired the coroner.

‘No, sir,’ replied the doctor, who was a stolid man with a humorous mouth, ‘I did not.’

‘But I understood the corpse to be—to have been decapitated. You do not know whether decapitation causes death?’

‘It can do so,’ replied the witness, with austere enjoyment, ‘but in this case I do not think it was necessarily the decapitation which caused death.’

‘You mean you think that the man was already dead when he was decapitated?’

‘That is my opinion.’

‘What grounds have you for that opinion?’

‘The complete absence of bruises, no sign of the man having been tied up, and no physical evidence that he had been drugged. The body presented no
evidence of any recent injury at all, except that the head was missing.’

‘Then, if so, I do not think I follow your reasoning. If the corpse showed no other sign of injury, why should you assume that decapitation was not the cause of death?’

The doctor employed a variety of learned terms unintelligible to anybody in court but Mrs Bradley, who happened to be a doctor herself, in describing the reactions of tissue injured before and after death, and then added, ‘But the absence of other injury would be, in itself, in my opinion, sufficient proof. It is not consistent with the rest of the evidence to suppose that the man committed suicide, because of the missing head, and I am also not prepared to believe that he lay across the railway line merely at another person’s orders.’

The next witness was Roger. He found that he was no longer nervous, for the court was so quietly formal, in spite of the fantastic evidence which had to be given, that he felt calm and entirely clear-headed.

‘Now, Mr Hoskyn,’ said the coroner, ‘you are the person who discovered the body. I think you had better tell the court exactly what occurred.’

‘I was walking on the common not far from Whiteledge on the morning of Good Friday last when I entered a small copse and saw the body.’

‘One moment, Mr Hoskyn. Were you alone when this occurred?’

‘Oh, no. I was with Mrs Bradley and Miss Woodcote.’

‘Are they in court?’

‘Yes.’

‘Had you any particular reason for entering the copse?’

‘Yes. I followed the dog which we had taken out for a run.’

‘Could you not have called him?’

‘No. He was not my dog and wouldn’t have come, I imagine.’

‘But you did not even try calling him?’

‘No.’

‘To whom did the dog belong?’

‘To Miss Clandon, I believe, but at any rate, not to any of us who were with him.’

‘Is it, in your opinion, right or reasonable to take out a dog over which you have no control?’

‘Well, you see …’

‘I think you had some special reason for taking a dog out that morning. Will you please tell me clearly what it was?’

‘We thought the dog might track Mr Lingfield, who, of course, had been missing all night.’

‘With your permission,’ said Mrs Bradley rising, ‘I should point out, perhaps, that the dog was taken out by me, and not by Mr Hoskyn. When the dog ran into the copse Mr Hoskyn gallantly followed.’

‘So did you,’ said Roger.

‘And the dog had, in point of fact, tracked down Mr Lingfield’s body?’ said the coroner.

‘That is so, sir. Mrs Bradley and I then saw the
body, and—well, the police came up then, and took over.’

‘The police came up? Why?’

‘They were all over the heath searching for Mr Lingfield, and Mrs Bradley whistled them up.’

‘Oh? She could whistle up the police although she couldn’t whistle up the dog! Was that it?’ asked the coroner, pleased with his own wit.

‘The police were more intelligent than the dog,’ said Roger, smoothly. ‘They came when called.’

Claudia Denbies was the next witness. She was taken over her previous evidence, but still declared resolutely that the dead man was not Lingfield.

‘But you do realize,’ said the coroner, remarkably gently, ‘that the body has been recognized and sworn to by the chauffeur and valet, Herbert Sim, whom I shall call in a moment, to be that of Mr Lingfield, don’t you, Mrs Den—Vesper?’

‘I realize it, yes,’ said Claudia, ‘but my statement——’

‘My client’s statement,’ said Mr MacAdam, smoothing his waistcoat as he rose, ‘is also made upon oath, sir.’

‘No one was suggesting anything else,’ said the coroner, looking prim. ‘One of the witnesses is mistaken, that is all. It remains to discover which one.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr MacAdam.

‘Do you pretend,’ continued the coroner, returning to Claudia, ‘to know as confidently as his manservant the details of——’

‘Mr Lingfield’s physical peculiarities,’ said Mr MacAdam, rising again, ‘were very well known to my client. She nursed him in hospital during the first World War, which you probably recollect, sir.’

‘Oh, ah, er, yes,’ said the coroner, recoiling from this simple revelation. ‘Oh, I see. And during this—er—nursing——’

‘Certainly. Mr Lingfield was suffering from——’ He ostentatiously flicked open a typewritten folder.

‘Yes, yes,’ said the coroner. ‘I think we can leave that, Mr MacAdam. Nevertheless,’ he continued, turning to Claudia again, ‘I must ask you (and
not
your lawyer,’ he added, glaring boldly at the beautiful solicitor who appeared to be cracking a small joke with Mrs Bradley), ‘I must ask you to give me an answer to my question.’

‘Yes, I
do
know,’ said Claudia sharply, ‘and Mr MacAdam has told you why. I know perfectly well that Mr Lingfield had two noticeable scars on the left buttock, and I even know how he got them, because, as a matter of fact, he told me all about it himself. He was getting through some barbed wire when he was poaching rabbits, and he caught his trousers and tore them and his—and himself, too.’

‘Poaching? But he had plenty of land of his own!’

‘He always preferred poaching on other people’s property. My late husband often remarked on it,’ said Claudia with an emphasis unmistakable in the circumstances.

Somebody laughed and the coroner coughed a rebuke. Then he asked suddenly:

‘Which
buttock?’

‘The—the left; no, the right,’ said Claudia.

‘Call Herbert Sim,’ said the coroner. Sim, his buttons shining and his chauffeur’s cap smartly under his arm, looked as though he were going to click his heels and salute the coroner. The coroner regarded him mildly.

‘You have no doubt that it was your employer whose body you saw?’ he enquired in gentle tones.

‘No doubt, sir.’

‘Describe the marks of identification which gave you the impression that it was Mr Lingfield who was dead.’