Uncoffind Clay, page 20
part #57 of Mrs Bradley Series
‘No. It was a marriage of convenience. The convenience in this case is that married persons cannot be compelled to give evidence against one another in a court of law. Laura pin-pointed that.’
I chewed it all over and things began to fall into place. I reviewed the various incidents which had taken place during my stay in Strode Hillary and one thing which came vividly back to my mind was a remark made by Innes before Dame Beatrice appeared on the scene. I could remember word for word what he had said, so it must have impressed me more than I had realised at the time. I could even recall the exact tone of his voice and the occasion on which the words had been spoken.
‘I’ve a feeling that, in spite of her helpfulness and general appearance of goodwill, she’s a very dangerous person… I have a suspicion that Martha Lorne is going to cause a lot of trouble some day… So far as Mary and I are concerned, there’s no information to be collected…’ Innes had said.
Well, if Martha Lorne had been one of the murderers, as Dame Beatrice thought, she had been dangerous enough in her way, but not nearly so dangerous, I thought, as Skiddy Winters. As we walked out of Innes’s house to where George was seated at the wheel of her car ready to take us back to the Stone House, Dame Beatrice said, as though she had read my thoughts (a feat I would by no means put past her):
‘I don’t like blackmail.’ When we were in the car and were taking the left-hand bend which would bring us into the Square, she added: ‘Of course, the chances are that Martha did tamper with the brakes of the car. Winters was able to convince her that he knew she had done so and it must have been her own guilty conscience which did the rest.’
‘So you think she may be a treble murderess.’
‘At any rate a double one, and it was very interesting that there was the doll, you know. I don’t believe either Breedy or his son have the type of mentality to make a connection between the name Winters and a doll in the form of a snowman.’
‘I hadn’t thought of it, either. Boys and men haven’t much affinity with dolls. There was the darning-needle, too.’
‘And we do know that the doll was not stolen from the museum at the same time as the other exhibits.’
‘I still can’t see how Chettle smuggled out the man-trap, the swingle and those two large smocks without being spotted by the curator.’
‘Oh, thereby, I think, lies the slightly slanted truth as told by Chettle. I think Hamid asked to borrow the things. The man-trap was his own idea, remember. It was after there was all the police investigation that the curator claimed that the articles had been stolen. He knew that his word would be taken against Chettle’s if Hamid’s life was lost. He lent the man-trap to please a very rich man’s son, not dreaming any harm would come of it.’
‘Still, Chettle would have been jugged, anyway, for his part in the burglaries,’ I said. ‘What about Batcombe?’
‘I shall put in a word with Innes. Batcombe will be more fortunate than he deserves to be. No godly, righteous and sober youth should associate with Chettle.’
‘Do you think he’s a psychopath?’
‘Chettle? I think he is fully responsible for his actions.’
I returned to the doll. Her deductions about it intrigued rne.
‘Somebody could have put the connection between the doll and the surname into somebody else’s head,’ I suggested. ‘It need have nothing to do with Martha.’
‘Agreed, but I feel that both the Breedys would consider the thought too fanciful to merit serious consideration. Besides, the darning needle suggested a woman, as you thought, particularly as a thimble would have been necessary in connection with it.’
‘A thimble isn’t the only thing you could use to push a needle in far enough.’
‘Agreed,’ she said again.
‘What put you on to the Breedys?’
‘Oh, you had mentioned your would-be suicide to Innes and Mary, and when they told me of the incident I could not imagine a young man in these times being so much in awe of his father over a girl as I learned later that Robert Breedy was supposed to be.’
‘Hamid Aziz was in awe of his father.’
‘The two cases are not comparable. The religious and racial aspect is one thing, and the idea that Mr Okeford would demand money for allowing his daughter to marry into Breedy’s family is quite another and is, to use Okeford’s own word, ludicrous. Besides, the Arabs’ story was genuine, the Breedys’ completely false.’
‘So you cast about for another explanation of Bob Breedy’s urge to commit suicide?’
‘Not at first, but I felt, when I heard of it, that fear of his father seemed an unlikely explanation in Bob’s case. Then your recollection of the third burglar as a youth whose description would have fitted a young man of twenty—’
‘Yes, I ought to have realised that, I suppose, but the caretaker told the police that his accomplice was Winters. Remember, too, that I had never met Winters.’
‘Neither had I, but whereas a young actor does not find it difficult to represent himself as being older than he is, it is a task requiring great skill and technique for an older man to appear a good deal younger than his real age. I did not believe that Winters, a man approaching middle age, could have led you to think that he was a youth.’
‘What made you think that her attempt to continue her brother’s blackmailing tactics led to the murder of Effie Winters?’
‘The mere fact that she was murdered. In other words, the murderer realised that the murder of Winters had scotched the snake, not killed it.’
‘What about the deep freeze?’
‘My suspicions having taken the direction they did, again the Breedys appeared to be implicated.’
‘Breedy made no bones about admitting that he possessed one of the things.’
‘Why should he have denied it? Lots of people would have known about it and other farmers had one.’
‘How does Martha Lorne come into it, apart from the doll and the darning-needle?’
‘Martha Lorne Breedy is the kind of woman who, in a small town such as Strode Hillary, probably has a finger in everybody’s pie. It seems that the burglary at Innes’s house was the last which was carried out. There must have been a great deal of talk about the burglars’ previous exploits and various theories put forward as to their identity, especially as there must have been rumours that they might be local men.’
‘And my description, such as it was, of the young chap I found in Innes’s kitchen could have confirmed this, you think?’
‘I think it suggested something to Martha and it was then, I think, that she made contact with Robert Breedy. She herself was being blackmailed by Winters on the strength of the failure of the brakes of her husband’s car and I think she may have held the whip over Robert and accused him of being one of the burglars.’
‘But wasn’t that a very dangerous thing to do?’
‘No, because she pointed out that he and she had a common cause and that if Winters died their troubles would be over.’
‘What, a Thompson and Bywaters case?’
‘Oh, I think not. There was no question of a love-affair between them. Their marriage was a mistake.’
‘Yes, I suppose it did rather give the game away.’
‘It certainly did to Okeford, I think. At any rate, she worked upon the young man, no doubt neither of them realising, up to that point, that Effie Winters could turn out to be quite as dangerous as her brother. It was easy enough to get Winters up to Breedy’s farmhouse at a time when, I imagine, Amos Breedy was at the public house and the little maidservant had finished her day’s duties and gone home. Winters was still negotiating with Breedy for the sale of Long Fallow to the sheikh, you will remember, so he would not be surprised at receiving a summons purporting to come from Amos, but actually sent by Robert. A little later on, when the murder had been committed, Amos Breedy knew what had happened because the body in his deep freeze could not be hidden from him. He was guiltless of the murder, but was willing to hide the evidence of his son’s crime.’
‘You think young Breedy did the actual stabbing, then?’
‘It seems more likely to have been a strong youth’s confident blow rather than the more frenzied and probably messy attempts of a woman, although Martha, frightened by Winters’s domination, must have been the moving spirit, I think. Still, a young man expert at slaughtering pigs would make a nice clean job of the stabbing of a man, no doubt.’
‘What do you think they did with the murder weapon?’
‘Well, we know what the weapon was in the case of Effie Winters. She was bludgeoned to death with one of her own bottles, and that, I am sure, was Martha’s work.’
‘Must have had fingerprints on it.’
‘Yes, but none that are on record. The thieves were fingerprinted, but they did not kill Effie Winters. The prints do not tally. They will with Martha’s, though.’
‘So what did Bob do with the knife?’
‘I think the weapon with which Winters was killed is somewhere at the bottom of the mere at Lower Gushbrook. The police are dredging for it, but it may take them a long time to find it. When they do, it will probably clinch the case against Robert Breedy. How much evidence there will be against his wife I do not know. She may be able to explain how her fingerprints came to be on the bottle in Effie Winters’s house.’
‘There is one thing, you know,’ I said, ‘and there could be plenty of witnesses to it.’ I was remembering an early conversation I had had with Innes when I had asked him why he did not like Martha Lorne. ‘She probably had a key to Winters’s house. She had sets of keys to lots of people’s homes so that she could go in at holiday times and feed their pets and so forth. She probably walked in on Effie, sloshed her and left the keys behind to get rid of them in the simplest way.’
I suppose the sentences were duly carried out. At any rate, the next time I went to Strode Hillary all was peace again. As I drove along the lanes, I saw honeysuckle and wild clematis in the hedgerows, yellow iris on the riverbanks, and when I got to the house all the roses were out in Mary’s garden.
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[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[A 3S Release— v1, html]
[December 26, 2006]
Gladys Mitchell, Uncoffind Clay
