The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop

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.’

‘But then,’ mused Mrs Bradley, ‘if he killed him here, and not in the Manor Woods as I first assumed he did, what on earth was that young man in such a stew about? Am I wrong? Have I picked out the right person? I can’t be wrong. Shut the door, boy, and go for the inspector. Bring him along here and make him a present of the spot where the murder was committed.’ She cackled sardonically, and then added, ‘I thought there was not enough blood on that Stone. Don’t say anything. Just go! I’m going to walk a little way – and think.’

Aubrey left her.

Mrs Bradley crossed the hockey-field and sat down in the adjoining meadow. She rested her sharp bony chin on her hands, and stared into the distance. Suddenly she began to chuckle. Then she stood up, and the sheep, looking up startled from their peaceful grazing, saw a small elderly lady, clad in rainbow-coloured jumper and check tweed skirt, sprinting gallantly across two fields back to the little wooden shed.

Aubrey and the inspector, whom he had met as though by prearrangement at the lodge gates of the Manor House, were walking towards her. She waved to them, and disappeared inside the hut. In about half a minute she reappeared with equal suddenness and walked out to meet them. The inspector grinned cheerfully at her, and winked to himself.

‘We ourselves thought there wasn’t enough blood on the Stone for the murder to have been done there,’ he observed cautiously as she came up. ‘But I wonder –’

‘The first point I want to make clear, inspector,’ interpolated Mrs Bradley, ‘is that, if the murder was committed here, and not in the woods, then James Redsey was not the murderer.’

‘How do you make that out, Mrs Bradley?’

‘The time. Mrs Bryce Harringay saw the two cousins disappearing into the Manor Woods at five minutes to eight. At about five and twenty minutes to nine, James Redsey was in the “Queen’s Head” drinking himself fuddled. That means in forty minutes he argued with his cousin, knocked him down, hid him in the bushes, gave him time to come to, inveigled him up here across that field and alongside this one, stabbed him in the throat, collected his blood in Sethleigh’s own silver tobacco-case, carried this case gingerly back to the Manor Woods, emptied it over the Stone of Sacrifice, disposed of it among the bushes, went to the “Queen’s Head” without a single visible mark of blood on his clothes or hands, and was seated there drinking hard at twenty-five minutes to nine.’

The inspector scratched his head.

‘I’d like to put that down,’ he said dubiously. ‘You’re leading me up the garden somewhere, Mrs Bradley, and I can’t just see where for the moment. There’s a catch in that explanation of yours. Just give me that idea again, if you don’t mind.’

Mrs Bradley cackled.

‘Inspector, you should go far,’ she said. ‘There is a flaw in that reconstruction. A big flaw. Tell me when you find it. But do me the justice to look for that silver tobacco-case, won’t you? Oh, and do have another good hunt for those clothes,’ she added brightly. ‘Oh, and there is poor James Redsey’s wicked accomplice to be found, who so obligingly carved up the body for James, since we can prove the boy did not perform that nasty job for himself. That accomplice, unwept and unhonoured, has been sung for by all the newspapers in the country. I really think you must find him, inspector, you know.’

The inspector grinned good-humouredly.

‘You’ve got me there, all right,’ he admitted. ‘The clothing and that accomplice would down any case against James Redsey, in the hands of a clever defending counsel. I keep on telling the superintendent so. We can’t prove that the boy cut up the body. He didn’t cut it up. And that’s where the thing hangs fire.’

III

‘The worst of amateurs who think they can teach the police their job,’ remarked Inspector Grindy sententiously to the superintendent, ‘is that they don’t even give us credit for a bit of ordinary gumption such as you would think even a baby would have. Now, look at that hockey-shed business! Interfering old busybody! And look here, sir, I got on to Wright again about that skull which disappeared from his studio, but I can’t get hold of anything. Of course, I’m not worrying overmuch. Don’t believe it has anything to do with Sethleigh. I searched the Manor House. Nothing, except notes of those people Rupert Sethleigh did not blackmail. I searched the park and the woods. Nothing again, except freshly dug earth, which turns out to be a practical joke on the part of the boy, although he denies it –’

‘Does he?’ said the chief constable who had been called into the case in a consultative capacity, and was now standing with them on the Manor House lawn. ‘Then, you know, inspector, I should almost feel inclined to believe him.’