feet.
CHAPTER XIII
I
AT six o’clock on the following day, Aubrey and Jim called at the Vicarage for Felicity Broome, and the three of them walked over to the Stone House.
Mrs Bradley received them in the stone-flagged, oak-panelled hall, and without any preliminaries, except for the removal of Felicity’s hat, she caused them to be seated at a large oak table, and presented each of them with a pencil and a pad of writing-paper.
‘Plenty of paper, you see,’ said Mrs Bradley, cackling hideously but with obvious pleasure.
‘Look here,’ said Jim Redsey, grinning. ‘Can’t I be let off? Honestly, I’m not a scrap of good at these parlour games. I always make the most frightful fool of myself. You three play, and I’ll be umpire and see you don’t cheat.’
‘Oh, but this is a new game,’ objected Mrs Bradley. ‘And it doesn’t need an umpire. Now, take up your pencils. Write your name and the date on top of the paper. Pencils down as soon as you have finished.’
Aubrey giggled.
‘It’s like the kindergarten I went to as a small kid,’ he observed, scrawling the date in his curiously grown-up handwriting, and then laying his pencil on the table.
‘Now listen to me,’ went on Mrs Bradley. ‘I want you all to make a long list of places where the skull which disappeared from Mr Wright’s house may be hidden. Are you ready?’ She smiled hideously around at the three hapless young people. ‘Then . . . go!’
At the end of twenty minutes she collected the papers and sent her visitors home. At seven o’clock another party of guests arrived. These were Lulu Hirst and Savile from the Cottage on the Hill. They had come to dinner. At a quarter past seven the vicar arrived with the major’s two daughters. The two large, plain girls explained that their father’s gout was troublesome, and so he would not come.
When dinner was over, Mrs Bradley went through the same performance with pencils and paper. The guests were uncertain whether to be amused or bored by the proceedings, but reflected that they had enjoyed an excellent dinner!
Next morning, Mrs Bradley walked over to the cottage where George Willows – in the act of commanding his wife to eat a second rasher of bacon – was having his breakfast, and asked him the same question.
Willows lowered a knife covered with yolk of egg into his mouth, while Mrs Bradley quickly averted her gaze, then he laid knife and fork down and turned in his chair.
‘Take a seat, mum, if you please,’ said Mrs Willows, hastily but unnecessarily dusting a chair. Mrs Bradley sat down.
‘Hide the skull?’ said George Willows meditatively. He ruminated. ‘Happen I should bury un,’ he said at length, while a slow smile spread over his sun-tanned features. ‘Ah, that’s what I should do meself, like. Bury un in the ground. And plant a big plant over un, like.’ he added, embroidering the idea richly.
‘A helpful suggestion,’ observed Mrs Bradley.
‘And if I knowed for certain sure it were the skull of that there Mr Sethleigh as turned me out with hard words and a blow too and all, I lay I’d stamp on un hard,’ concluded George Willows truculently.
Mrs Willows gazed at the bold fellow in terrified admiration. She had been a hero-worshipper for fifteen years.
‘I think we might cross you out of the list of suspects, my friend,’ thought Mrs Bradley as she walked up the lane towards the house of Dr Barnes and turned in at the double gates. ‘Still, I am very glad I have had a look at you. Conclusive, I think. Exit Willows.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Margery Barnes, straightening her back at Mrs Bradley’s approach, for she had spent the previous twenty minutes in weeding the gravel path. ‘Father is out on his round. I’m expecting him home soon, though. He usually comes in at about ten, and goes out again at about eleven.’ She glanced at Mrs Bradley’s face. ‘You don’t look very ill,’ she remarked.
Mrs Bradley stretched out a claw-like hand and tweaked her short fair hair.
‘I am not in the least ill. I am thankful to say,’ she observed. ‘I have come to consult your father about a different matter. Rather a serious matter, I am afraid.’
Margery blanched.
‘Not about that horrible murder? You’re not going to ask Father anything about that?’ she cried in consternation.
‘Hoots toots!’ cried Mrs Bradley, who professed an enormous admiration for the Scots people and occasionally expressed herself in what she fondly believed to be their native tongue. ‘And here
‘Oh, Father!’ cried Margery. ‘Mrs Bradley has called to ask you –’
‘To prescribe for old Martha Higgs down in the village,’ interpolated Mrs Bradley neatly. Margery gasped with relief, and subsided. ‘She is not an insured person, Mrs Bradley continued, ‘and she can’t get a widow’s pension because unfortunately she is a spinster. She has the old age pension and two shillings a week from her nephew – good luck to him for a dutiful and generous boy, for he has a wife and children of his own – and her rheumatism is really very bad. I think a time at Bath might help the poor dear. I suppose a cure, or anything approaching a cure, is hopeless at her age, but I think perhaps –’
Imagining that the discussion might probably last for some time, Margery slipped away to her own room, changed her shoes, put on a hat, and bicycled down to the Vicarage.
As soon as Margery had gone, Mrs Bradley propounded to the doctor her question as to the probable hiding- place of the skull.
‘Of course,’ the doctor remarked, his fresh-coloured face flushing darkly, ‘if they had brought the thing to me instead of giving it to young Wright to monkey about with, I could soon have told them whether it was Sethleigh’s skull or not. You had only to try his dental plate in the jaws and deduce whether it would fit.’
‘Quite so. I had thought of that myself,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘But there were two objections to the plan at the time you mentioned.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, doctor. For one thing, when the bishop handed the skull over to Cleaver Wright there was no idea of its being Sethleigh’s skull. The bishop and the vicar had an argument to which historic or prehistoric period the skull belonged, and the vicar expressed some hope that a complete model in clay might help to settle the question. That was all. Secondly, the dental plate, I suppose, was in Sethleigh’s mouth when he met his death, and so –’
‘The police haven’t found it, you mean,’ said the doctor. ‘H’m! I see. Still, it would have been an infallible proof, you know. Quite infallible! I mean, a man’s dental plate, like his finger-prints, can’t possibly belong to anyone else, you know.’
Mrs Bradley shook her head slowly from side to side until she looked like some hideously leering idol from the East. ‘Is any proof ever infallible?’ she asked sadly.
II
Felicity was out, and the Reverend Stephen Broome was preparing his sermon when Margery alighted at the Vicarage gate, propped up her bicycle against the untidy hedge, and walked up to the front door.
‘The mistress is along by the village, and, sure, himself will have my life, Miss Margery, should I put the face of me inside his little room this day,’ exclaimed Mary Kate when Margery asked to see either the vicar or his daughter.
‘I can’t help it. If Felicity is out, I
‘The murder! Oh, then, Miss Margery, what’s come over you at all?’
‘Nothing. Go and tell the vicar quickly, Mary Kate. Oh, do hurry up!’
Upon this, Mary Kate flung herself into the study, omitting even the formality of knocking at the door, and
