The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (21 page)

The vicar stared helplessly after her as she walked out of the house with the trousers slung gracefully over her arm.

At eight o'clock in the evening, Felicity returned. She helped the last child off the bus, delivered each of the fifteen to a waiting parent, returned the courtesies of the whole band – parents and children too – and walked straight in at Mrs Bradley's front door, which was standing wide open.

‘Well?' said Mrs Bradley, appearing abruptly from the kitchen, where she had been superintending the dishing up of dinner.

Felicity seized her arm.

‘I've seen it!' she said.

‘Seen what, my dear?'

‘Behind the model of a Roman shield. How did you know? Had you seen it, or did you guess? Oh, but you must have seen it! But how did it get there? Nobody has a key to those cases except Father and the curator – oh, and the bishop, of course! Mrs Bradley' – she shook the old woman's arm – ‘do explain! What is it?'

Mrs Bradley led her into the dining-room and pushed her into a chair.

‘To the best of my knowledge and belief,' she said, ‘it is Rupert Sethleigh's skull.'

‘But how did it get there?' Felicity pulled off her hat and pushed a hand through her hair.

‘That is something which I would give a good deal to know for certain,' said Mrs Bradley. ‘I suppose it would be too much to ask you to take another party of children to-morrow and look to see if it's still there? I would go myself, but I am particularly anxious not to appear in this little comedy. My part shall be that of stage-manager. Oh, and tell your father the inspector refuses to be parted from those trousers! I am awfully sorry. I feared something of the kind might be the case. However' – she chuckled ghoulishly and bared her tigerish teeth – ‘they are
not
the nether garments of the late lamented Sethleigh. I can't think why I ever thought they would be, but of that some more anon. Never mind! The skull is his if the trousers are not! Half a loaf is better than no bread. Go up and wash, child, and stay here to dinner.'

The last thing Felicity saw as she turned to go up the stairs was Mrs Bradley's grin. She began to understand how Alice in Wonderland must have felt upon first beholding the Cheshire Cat.

Mrs Bradley Takes a Hand

‘I
WANT
to hear more about that suitcase,' said Mrs Bradley to Felicity Broome. ‘Can you spare ten minutes?'

‘I should be glad to get away from this for a little while.' Felicity waved her arms expressively at sixteen yards of curtaining which she was cutting up and machining ready for the Vicarage windows. ‘It's ages since we had some new curtains, and I simply had to have these. Not that we can afford them,' she added frankly, ‘but the unspeakable Lulu scorched the last lot nearly to bits, so I simply
had
to get some more.' She pushed the billows of material aside and stood up.

‘Lulu? You don't mean – ?'

‘Lulu Hirst, otherwise Savile. Yes, I do. She took a fancy to Father and offered to do anything we liked in the way of washing and ironing. She used to work in a laundry before she became an artist's model. She does all Father's and the choristers' surplices, and things like that. We daren't trust Mary Kate with anything which really matters, so when Lulu offered to wash and iron the curtains I didn't like to refuse. But you should have
seen
the state in which she brought them home! She was frightfully upset about it, of course, and offered to provide new ones, but we could not let her do that, especially as she had always done everything so beautifully and so carefully before.'

‘Well, come along,' said Mrs Bradley briskly. ‘In here? All right. Now, first I want to know who found this suitcase.'

‘I did.'

‘Where?'

‘On our dust-heap.'

‘Do you often have occasion to visit the dust-heap?'

‘Yes. You see, Mary Kate is so frightfully wasteful that the only way I can keep her in check is to visit the dust-heap daily and make myself frightfully nasty if she has thrown away anything unnecessarily.'

‘I see. And you thought it was unnecessary to throw away a suitcase?'

‘Well, I picked it up and at once noticed Rupert Sethleigh's initials. I knew Father had borrowed it for our holiday in May, but I was under the impression that he had returned it.'

‘Now think very carefully for a minute,' said Mrs Bradley, ‘and then tell me what gave you that impression.'

Felicity's grey eyes, lovely in their sweet seriousness, gazed unseeingly into the blue haze of the July morning. She had seated herself on the broad step which led into the garden and her hands were clasped round her knees. Mrs Bradley, looking at her, sighed inaudibly.

After some moments, Felicity looked up at the old woman and answered slowly:

‘After we came back from Hastings, Father put it on the landing outside his bedroom door, because he knows how absent-minded and forgetful he is, and so he said that seeing it would remind him to return it. Well, now. We went to Hastings in early May – I've got the date somewhere. Excuse me a minute. I'll go upstairs and find it.'

She soon returned with a small blue diary.

‘Here we are.'

She turned over the pages.

‘We went down there on May 2nd, and we came home on May 12th. Short, but quite sweet, you see. The suitcase would have been put on the landing – Now, let me see, Father did not unpack it until the Monday, when I reminded him that his collars and things must be washed. The 12th was a Wednesday, so that makes it the 17th when it was put on the landing. I last saw it –' She screwed up her charming nose in a gallant effort to remember, but at last was compelled to shake her head. ‘I am awfully sorry,' she confessed, ‘but I can't remember. It couldn't have been more than a fortnight ago, I think, that I noticed it there, but I can't remember the actual day. I know I continually badgered Father to return it, but he kept forgetting. I would have returned it myself, except that I hated going up to the Manor House alone when Rupert Sethleigh was there. I don't mind now.'

The Reverend Stephen Broome came in just as she finished speaking.

‘Oh, I say, Felicity,' he began. Mrs Bradley cut him short ruthlessly.

‘Be quiet, my dear,' she said.

The vicar stopped short, and stared at her as a man might who had been wakened suddenly from sleep.

‘And let me think,' Mrs Bradley went on. ‘Felicity, did Lulu Hirst ever wash and iron your father's clerical collars?'

‘Always,' replied Felicity. ‘Why? Oh, and one is missing, by the way. I must ask her about it.'

‘Do, my dear. And now, where is my friend Mary Kate?'

Felicity went to the door and called her by name. Mary Kate entered, wiping her hands on her apron.

‘And what will you be after this time, ma'am?' she enquired, with a deference she would have scorned to display towards weaker and meeker women than Mrs Bradley.

‘First, I will be after suggesting that you do not come into my presence and that of your mistress fingering your apron in that distressingly fidgety fashion,' replied Mrs Bradley. ‘Secondly, I want a piece of string and a sheet – a very large sheet – of brown paper.'

‘Is it a string and brown paper you're expecting to get the loan of in this house!' cried Mary Kate, lifting her hands in horror. ‘Sure, Saint Michael and all his angels couldn't be finding string and brown paper hereabouts, without they would be bringing it with them! Sure, I'm telling you, the only bit of string that was fit to hang a cat I ever saw in this house was the same that was holding up the trousers of his reverence on him, the way he wouldn't be knowing which way to look for the buttons that were off them when the bishop and Herself came here for a wet of tea that day. And myself baking the face off me with the scones they ate and the dog over the way snatching the cold meat from under me very nose and I grasping it from his jaws before himself could be ating it entirely, bad cess to him for a slavering brute of a great rascally thief!' cried Mary Kate, in an inspired burst of rhetoric.

‘Oh, I see. So you just pushed the laundry into the suitcase and handed the case to Lulu Hirst as it was,” said Mrs Bradley, nodding her head.

‘To Lulu Hirst indeed!' said Mary Kate indignantly. ‘Indeed, then, and I did not! But to an impudent bit of a snubby-nosed gossoon of a boy that's had the rough side of me tongue more than once, and will be feeling the weight of me hand if he's after asking me again did I go on me holidays to the Isle of Man!'

The obscure but apparently lasting significance of spending one's holiday in the Isle of Man was lost on Mrs Bradley, but the circumstantial evidence that Rupert Sethleigh's suitcase had been handed to the boy was not. She left the Vicarage, went in search of Aubrey Harringay, sent him upon a quest, and learned that the boy had safely delivered the suitcase to Lulu. He was a bright boy. Closely questioned, he remembered the date. It was the day his father had given him fourpence to go on an outing on the following Saturday.

‘It would have been the Thursday, missus. And the Saturday would have been the Saturday before that there Bossbury murder. Yes, the day before, missus. Thank you kindly, missus. Yes, missus. Good day.'

Mrs Bradley, closely followed by Aubrey Harringay, climbed the apparently innumerable steps of the old Observation Tower, and at last emerged triumphantly upon the platform at the top. Slung across her shoulders was a pair of powerful field-glasses, and in her right hand she carried a roughly sketched plan of the Manor House and its grounds, including a little of the surrounding country.

‘Now, I've killed Sethleigh – here,' she said to Aubrey, spreading the plan on top of a stout iron post which helped to carry the safety railing around the platform on which they stood. She pointed a yellow talon at the Stone of Sacrifice, which was indicated on the plan by a black blob. ‘Now, it is necessary to hide the body during the night. Where can I hide it?'

She glanced down at the plan and then gazed narrow-eyed at the country below.

‘Ha!' she ejaculated at last. ‘Aubrey! What is that shed arrangement over there to the left? The hockey club's dressing-shed? Oh, that's interesting, I used to play hockey once.'

‘Old Jim's good,' said Aubrey. ‘Plays centre half. Played for Southern Counties against the Rest once. Only just missed being picked for England the year before last. Don't suppose he'll get hockey in Mexico.'

‘If he ever gets to Mexico,' said Mrs Bradley dryly. ‘Hockey is a winter game, isn't it?' she added inconsequently.

Aubrey, who had begun to look sober at the reference to the murder, now grinned.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Why?'

‘A very important reason,' returned Mrs Bradley. ‘Is the shed ever used for other purposes? I mean, does any club use it for summer games – cricket, for instance?'

‘No, I don't think so. But I say! Old Willows will know all about it. He acts as groundsman to the hockey club during the season. There he goes by the shrubbery. Shall I hail him? You knew the mater had reinstated him, didn't you?'

He split the air with a war-whoop which shook even Mrs Bradley's iron nerves. Willows looked up.

‘Come up here!' yelled Aubrey, wildly signalling in case his words should not be heard.

They could hear Willows come tramping up the stone steps.

After regaining his wind, he answered Mrs Bradley's curt questions.

No, the hockey club's dressing-shed was not used for any other purpose so far as he knew. He did not know whether it was kept locked. Probably not. There was no one to interfere with it. No, it was not exactly a local club. It was composed of a few gentlemen from Culminster and the old boys of Bossbury Grammar School. They played once a week, on Saturday afternoons. No, nobody ever went near the hut except during the season. It was across two fields and stuck in the middle of nowhere, you might say.

‘I think, Aubrey,' said Mrs Bradley, ‘that we ought to go and look at this hut. Will you accompany me?' She dismissed Willows with a nod and a smile, and a promise to come and see his sweet peas.

A little-used footpath, baked hard by the summer sun, led them across the first meadow, and, after diving through a gap in a hawthorn hedge between two ancient wooden stakes, they found another path which ended at the hockey shed. It was a mere lean-to, not even locked on the outside. Aubrey pushed open the badly fitting door, and Mrs Bradley walked in. The one small window was heavily covered in cobwebs, but the wide-open door flooded the little place with light. Ominous dark stains on the boarded floor immediately attracted the eye.

‘It is for the police to determine whether these are bloodstains,' said Mrs Bradley impersonally. ‘You're not going to be sick, are you?' she added anxiously.

‘No,' said Aubrey, rather pale. ‘This is where he killed him, then.'

‘What do you mean, child?'

‘Well, he hid the body here during Sunday night, I suppose. Jolly risky, lugging a dead body across these fields, even in the half-light of ten p.m. or thereabouts. I bet he wangled him here while Sethleigh was still feeling woozy from that bash on the head. Got him here, and then did him in. Besides, the chap wouldn't have bled like this if he was dead when the other chap lugged him in. The other chap then collected some of his victim's blood in – in – in what? – we shall have to find out – and poured it upon the Stone of Sacrifice. You know. Devil worship stunt! That accounts for the blood on the Stone.'