Bodies from the Library 4, page 25
CARTARET: Did it not occur to you to ring the doorbell and have him let you in? If he was not expecting you, I should have thought …
BELLA: Oh, it’s not me to stand on ceremony. Besides, I wouldn’t trouble him. Goodness knows, I’m sorry enough now I didn’t do as you say, but how did I know I was going to find him … (crying) To find him … (she breaks down)
CARTARET: Perhaps a drink of water?
BELLA: I’m all right. But to think of him, lying there on the floor, all stiff and cold.
CARTARET: Did you move the body at all?
BELLA: Me? Touch him—in the state he was in? Why, he was lying all out, with his nice black dinner jacket all creased up under him and his nice white hair all stained. And as for his tie—it was spotted and splashed with nasty red. I could see all that without going nowhere near him as soon as I come in the door. Me. Touch him? Not bloomin’ likely! Not me.
CARTARET: We have heard medical evidence to the effect that the deceased must have died not later than seven. What time, I wonder, did the servants go to the dance?
BELLA: They can tell you better than I can. But I happen to know they left the house, or should have done, at six. He wrote it me in a letter. He used to write every month to send me my money.
CARTARET: I understood you to say that your financial affairs were settled when you visited him.
BELLA: Yes, that’s right. Only, you see, I’m kind of expensive. The best is good enough for me and sometimes I get a bit overdrawn at the bank. That’s why we used to meet and settle. Though if you want to know what I think, I reckon he used to like a bit of company, for he used to say to me sometimes, ‘I only put on my glad-rags for you, my dear.’ It’s a proper compliment to a lady.
CARTARET: His glad-rags?
BELLA: Oh, you know, full evening dress, black tail-coat, white tie and that. ’Til that evening I’d never seen him in anything else. He was always the gentleman in everything. He would always order up a good wine and a nice drop of port if he’d asked me to come. Although he said he never hardly took it when he was alone …
CARTARET: … Yes, Bella Garsington made it sound very convincing—except for one small point which gave the flaw to her evidence. One small point which betrayed her and showed us what she had done. I wonder if you noticed it?
SOLUTION
COMPÈRE: Well, ‘The Case of Bella Garsington’ seems to have puzzled everybody. Quite a number of you got very hot but only one person guessed exactly what Bella had done. That she had had dinner with her father-in-law, killed him and attempted to conceal the fact that she had been there by changing his tail-coat—his glad-rags, which he only wore for her—for his dinner-jacket. But she had forgotten to change the white tie as well. She could not have seen splashes of blood on a black tie. So the only prize of ten and sixpence this time goes to Lieutenant J. V. Palmer. And congratulations, Lieutenant Palmer, on solving what seems to have been a pretty tricky murder.
GLADYS MITCHELL
Gladys Maude Mitchell was born in 1901 in what was then the village of Cowley near Oxford. After her parents moved to Brentford in west London, she attended the Rothschild School and from 1913 to 1918 the Green House for Girls, where she had a free place (and, incidentally, was exempt from daily prayer). It was at the Green that she wrote her first novel which, as with other juvenilia, appears to be lost.
After leaving school, Mitchell completed a teacher training course at Goldsmiths College in London and took a history diploma at University College, London. Mitchell was what used to be termed a ‘mannish woman’ and at college was known as ‘Mike’. On coming down, she embarked on what would be—other than one brief ‘retirement’—a lifelong career in teaching. Her first engagement was at St Paul’s, a small boys’ school in Brentford, where she met Winifred Blazey, an older teacher whom ‘Mike’ would come to call ‘Fred’.
In July 1925, Mitchell was appointed as an assistant teacher at St Mark’s, a local boys’ school where she had previously worked as a supply teacher. The following year, she moved to St Ann’s, a girls’ secondary school in nearby Hanwell. At St Ann’s, as well as teaching, she ran the amateur dramatic society, for which she wrote plays such as On Christmas Eve (1929), as well as playing a leading role in the delightfully named Joy and Pleasure Club, whose games’ evenings she coordinated. On New Year’s Eve in 1926 at a ‘carnival dance’ held by a local church at the school she won a fancy dress competition dressed as Prince Charming; not entirely uncoincidentally, cross-dressing—that characteristic of English pantomime—would feature in one of her earliest crime novels.
Mitchell loved writing, albeit in longhand and not on a typewriter, because she loathed the sound made by the keys. There appeared to be a lively market for detective fiction and she decided to write a mystery; as she happened to be reading Sigmund Freud, she made her detective a psychoanalyst. Speedy Death was published in 1929 and, while some critics felt Mitchell had failed to conceal the identity of at least one of those with something to hide, her ingenuity was widely praised. Similar praise was heaped upon her second mystery, the exceptionally gory but ‘unusually brilliant’ Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1929). Gladys Mitchell had arrived. Her detective, Beatrice Adele Lestrange Bradley, was soon recognized as one of the most extraordinary detectives in the genre and would become one of its most enduring, appearing in sixty novels over nearly sixty years.
After leaving St Ann’s Mitchell moved to Brentford Secondary School, where she was appointed as a fourth form teacher alongside Freda Blazey. She experimented with new teaching methods, writing in 1950 for History magazine about how she and Freda taught the subject by bringing out the connections with geography, archaeology and engineering. Mitchell said she valued the discipline that went with a teaching career and, although she did retire briefly on turning fifty, she seized an unexpected opportunity to return and in 1953 joined the staff of the Matthew Arnold Secondary School for Girls, where she taught history and English and wrote plays on classical and traditional subjects for performance by the girls. She finally retired from teaching in 1961 when she felt the cultural distance between teacher and pupils had become too great. To mark her retirement the school’s staff and pupils presented her with a five-month-old Boxer puppy called Robbie, and in 1962 the BBC gave her a half-hour radio programme, The Plaid Bag, in which she reflected on parallel careers as a teacher and novelist.
Defiantly unconventional and eccentric in every respect, Gladys Mitchell’s detective, Mrs Bradley is, in the words of the critic Frank Pardoe, ‘a true original’. She dresses like a cockatoo, smiles like a lizard and laughs like a hyena. But the eccentricities conceal genuine expertise. She is a trained psychoanalyst and is made a dame for her work with the police. She is a superb detective, adept not so much with physical evidence as with psychological clues. And like Mitchell, Mrs Bradley was a crack shot. In an interview with Barry Pike, the authority on Mitchell’s contemporary Margery Allingham and on crime fiction generally, Gladys Mitchell explained that Mrs Bradley, later Dame Beatrice, was ‘based on two delightful and most intelligent ladies’ and that the character had been born in 1929 in her mid-fifties, the age at which she would remain—more or less—for the whole of her long career.
Mitchell’s books, at times grimly comic, have a unique ‘taste’ and are often rooted in the folklore of the United Kingdom, with instances of witchcraft, druidic practice and satanic ritual. Winking at the Brim (1974) incorporates the legend of the monster of Loch Ness, while others have more prosaic settings such as the schools in Faintly Speaking (1954), following her return to teaching, and Death at the Opera (1934), which was inspired by the ‘Summerhill’ educational theories of Alexander Sutherland Neill. Some were influenced by the country’s landscape and lore, featuring morris dancing, scarecrows and the like, while others had their origins in prehistoric sites such as the Nine Stones at Winterbourne, which she fictionalized in The Dancing Druids (1948).
As well as conforming—largely—with the ‘very strict rules’ established by the Detection Club, Mitchell had her own rules and would not criticize the church or the police. She was similarly respectful of the Scouts and the Guides, and in 1957 created an entire regatta to celebrate the centenary of the West Middlesex Guides.
In 1932, Mitchell was elected to the Detection Club, her sponsors being the Club’s founder Anthony Berkeley and the Australian crime writer Helen Simpson, whose expert knowledge on witchcraft would inspire Mitchell’s sixth mystery, The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935). At one time Mitchell was the Club’s secretary and also acted as the librarian. She contributed to two collaborative crime novels: the immensely enjoyable Ask a Policeman (1933)—in which she and Helen Simpson wrote about each other’s detectives—and the less successful all-female round-robin mystery No Flowers by Request. Mitchell was also a member of the Crime Writers Association which, on the publication of her fiftieth book, awarded her the Association’s Silver Dagger.
As well as writing under her own name Mitchell wrote under two pseudonyms: as ‘Malcolm Torrie’, she wrote six detective novels featuring Timothy Herring, secretary of the Society for the Preservation of Historic Buildings, an organization not unlike the Ancient Monuments Society of which Mitchell was a member. While she would claim that Mrs Bradley’s secretary, Laura Menzies, was an idealized version of herself, it is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest that there may also be much of Gladys Mitchell in Timothy Herring.
Mitchell’s second pseudonym was ‘Stephen Hockaby’, as whom she wrote five vividly drawn historical novels, a novel for young adults entitled Shallow Brown (1939) and a play, The Master of Dreams (1934), set in ancient Egypt and performed at St Ann’s. Although the Hockaby novels were reviewed well, the last was apparently rejected by the publisher—this might be The Spears of Morning, a novel referenced in her agent’s records that has yet to come to light.
As well as fiction for adults, Mitchell also wrote half a dozen juvenile mysteries and a volume of poetry, Winnowings, which was published privately. Her agents’ records suggest that in the 1940s and ’50s she wrote for various women’s magazines. She also wrote several radio plays for the BBC including Full Fathom Five, a Mrs Bradley mystery of which the second half has been lost, as have the scripts of three other plays that were not accepted by the BBC: the tantalizingly titled Le Jour de Gloire (1941), The Case of the Tidy Waiter (1945) and The Limping Hound (1953).
After Freda Blazey’s death, Mitchell moved to Dorset to be near her brothers. She died in 1983 at her home at Corfe Mullen.
The Case of Bella Garsington was first broadcast on 10 February 1944 on the BBC’s General Forces Programme as one of a series of mystery plays entitled ‘A Corner in Crime’, a feature in the long-running feature Here’s Wishing You Well Again. The solution was broadcast on 23 March. This is the play’s first publication.
THE POST-CHAISE MURDER
Richard Keverne
It was a matter of business that took Sir Christopher Hazzard down the road that autumn night for a meeting with Mr Amble, the country attorney who dealt with the affairs of a small estate Sir Christopher owned in Hampshire.
Sir Christopher had put off the tiresome journey again and again. Then on the spur of the moment he had decided to get it over and had driven like fury from his chambers, in St James’s, to catch the Portsmouth Post Telegraph coach at the Angel Inn, St Clement’s, hoping to get his business done and to be back in London again the following evening.
Through a cold, wet night he dozed restlessly on top of the lumbering night stage, and he was weary and bored when, at length, the coach rattled over the cobbles of Ashmarket’s narrow High Street, turned into the Square and pulled up sharply before the archway of the Bear Inn.
Sir Christopher swung himself stiffly to the ground and stamped his numb feet. Although it was not yet sunrise there was an unwonted air of bustle about the place. Men stood in knots, talking eagerly. Scraps of excited conversation came to Sir Christopher’s ears.
‘Shot him dead he did, not two mile outside the town—Sammy Chale, he caught ’un, him and Mr Bond from the “Wagon”—gentleman posting from Portsmouth, so it’s said …’
Sir Christopher turned to the inn boots who was waiting to receive his baggage from the coach.
‘Some trouble here?’ he queried casually.
Boots was eager to talk.
‘Aye, indeed, there have been, sir. One of our chaises stopped close by Squire Easton’s lodge gate, not two mile outside the town, just after midnight. Gentleman shot dead, and Sammy Chale the post-boy lucky to be alive himself.’
‘Indeed. And have they taken the rogue?’
‘Red handed, as you might say, sir. Within ten minutes of his bloody murder. Sammy were too clever for ’un, he’s sharp is Sammy Chale. Slipped off his horse when the robber stopped him and ran for help.’ Sir Christopher smiled dryly. ‘Come upon Mr Bond from the “Wagon” at Dean riding up the road and told him, and they goes back and finds the robber. Mr Bond claps a pistol to his head and takes him.’
‘Ah well; he’s not likely to molest honest travellers on the road again,’ Sir Christopher commented casually.
‘That he won’t, sir. He’ll swing. And good riddance to all such murdering scoundrels, say I.’ Boots busied himself with the luggage, now deposited on the cobbles, and Sir Christopher took a pace or two towards a sly-eyed little fellow in a yellow-sleeved waistcoat who, surrounded by a curious knot of listeners, was shouting his story to the Coachman of the stage.
Sir Christopher regarded Sammy Chale with interest. The man was more than half-drunk and his story had already grown in oft telling to one or two, or maybe three, highway robbers whom he had bested; to shots fired that had missed him by a hair’s breadth; to a mighty struggle that he had made in overpowering the villain.
The coachman laughed good humouredly and chaffed the little man.
‘Reckon I’d better take you with me, Sammy, case they other rogues be waiting for me down the road,’ he said.
The post-boy protested his story the louder and Sir Christopher, mildly amused, made his way to the inn door.
To Kit Hazzard all crime was interesting. He had made it his study for many years and his own curious methods of detection had met with amazing success. It was his sport, as he often said, to hunt the criminal as others hunted the fox. He pitted his own brains and observation against the cunning of the malefactor and beat him more often than not. But this seemed no case to exercise his ingenuity. A straightforward and all too common robbery with violence on the highway with but one unusual fact about it—that the robber had already been taken.
He put the incident from his mind and gave his attention to a change of attire and to breakfast, which he badly needed, and to the affairs that had brought him to Ashmarket. Nor might he have given it more than a further passing thought but for Mr Amble, the attorney.
Sir Christopher had sent a note to Mr Amble immediately upon his arrival, announcing his unexpected visit. The lawyer appeared in person while he still sat at breakfast. Sir Christopher greeted him with surprise.
‘I had not meant to bring you out so early, Mr Amble,’ he said courteously. ‘I have dallied so long over my affairs already that they might well have waited another hour or so.’
Mr Amble raised a plump, deprecating hand.
‘No, Sir Christopher, I cannot claim it’s your affairs that bring me here so early,’ he said. ‘’Tis a far less agreeable matter that roused me from my bed two hours since.’
‘Indeed?’ Sir Christopher regarding the usually correct and dapper attorney realized that he had the air of one who had dressed hurriedly. His old-fashioned wig was awry and his cravat carelessly tied.
Mr Amble nodded.
‘A most unwelcome and strange matter, Sir Christopher,’ he continued. ‘A matter of robbery and murder on the highway.’
‘Oh? I heard some talk of a robbery and a man shot dead when I arrived,’ Sir Christopher said. ‘But I hear they’ve taken the rogue.’
‘That is so, sir; but there are some curious points about the affair. For example, here is a robbery that, if I may so put it, was no robbery. Over two hundred guineas were found upon the unhappy victim, aye, and thirteen more in his purse. It was to place this considerable sum in my sole keeping, that my good client Mr Charles Easton aroused me from my sleep this morning. Mr Easton is a Justice, sir, before whom the rogue was taken and the outrage took place close by his own lodge gates at Dean Grange. Mr Easton came to me for a dual reason, the one I have stated and because, as perhaps you will recall, I have the honour to be His Majesty’s coroner for this Liberty and upon me falls the duty of determining the facts of the unhappy man’s death.’
Mr Amble spoke with conscious pride.
‘I recall your important office, Mr Amble,’ Sir Christopher responded with becoming gravity, though in fact he was not at all sure that he did. ‘May I offer you some refreshment? A glass of wine—’
‘No, I thank you, Sir Christopher. A cup of coffee perhaps, for in truth I have not yet breakfasted.’
‘Then you shall join me, Mr Amble.’ Sir Christopher rose to summon a waiter, adding as he resumed his seat: ‘Tell me more of this affair. Who was the victim who travelled so well provided with guineas?’
‘There, sir, is one of the curious facts of the case. You may take my information as accurate for I have it from Mr Easton’s own lips. There is nothing on his body to say who he was, or what his business. No document, no scrap of paper, nothing.’
‘Curious. Very curious. What of the rogue who shot him?’
‘A notoriously bad character. A man named Jem Vaughan. A poaching, smuggling rogue who hails from a neighbouring village. A man who has often seen the inside of a jail.’
‘Ah! I know the type. Yet in my experience one more given to petty robbery than to stopping a chaise on the highway.’
