The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop

Mr Bidwell, they’ve neither of them got the stomach to carve up the corpse. It seems to me we’re up against that all the time. Those that had enough motive to do the murder couldn’t rake up the guts to cover their tracks by messing up the identity of the body. And those that are blood-thirsty enough to hang bits of a dead man on hooks don’t seem to have had enough motive to kick a dog – let alone commit a crime!’

II

‘Then there’s the question of Savile,’ said Mrs Bradley, after a pause. ‘A very vexed question, that of Savile. You see, the Stone itself would be such a temptation to him.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Aubrey.

‘A most curious person, Savile,’ Mrs Bradley went on. ‘I’ve made a whole sheaf of notes about him. I shall incorporate them in my small new work for the Sixpenny Library. It is entitled Psycho-Analysis for the Many. You might recommend it to your mother with my compliments! No, but Savile really is a gem. I wouldn’t have missed him for anything. And the vicar, too. Excellent. Surprisingly excellent, both of them.’

‘But Savile hadn’t any reason for hating Sethleigh,’ said Aubrey.

‘Hadn’t he? You go and ask Lulu Hirst about that.’ Mrs Bradley pursed her lips and shook her small black head.

‘Oh? Oh, really. Oh, I see.’ He didn’t, in the least, but at fifteen and three-quarters one hesitates about confessing ignorance on any subject under the sun.

‘Yes, Savile liked things done just so,’ Mrs Bradley went on, as though she were talking to herself. ‘And I wonder sometimes whether the Stone was too much for him. Somehow, though, I think he wouldn’t have carried the thing through so boldly. He is consistent, I am sure; neat and tidy to a fault – it was a very tidy person who left that butcher’s shop in such good order! – and he has a curious kink in his mentality. Have you observed it, child? But I don’t think he has the requisite amount of nerve, quite, for a murder.’

‘I’ve observed he’s a greasy swine,’ said Aubrey, without heat. ‘Can’t stick him at any price.’

‘Yes. I didn’t mean that. No, this that I am referring to struck me very forcibly when I went to call there one afternoon and discovered him in the act of interring a small dead bird – a canary which in life had belonged to Lulu Hirst.’

‘Oh?’ The hot afternoon was making Aubrey sleepy.

‘Yes. He was wearing a clergyman’s collar.’

‘Clergyman’s collar? Absent-minded blighter – like the vicar! Fancy two of them in one parish!’ He began to laugh.

‘Not absent-minded. That collar was a bit of ritual. Surely you noticed the Robin Hood suit when he nearly shot me in the Manor Woods that afternoon?’

‘Robin Hood suit? Oh, yes. But he told us he was rehearsing for a play.’

‘Rehearsing my foot!’ pronounced Mrs Bradley firmly. ‘He was dressed for the part he was playing in his imagination, that’s all. And that’s why I think he must be the butcher. You see, to him a dead body – dead flesh – would signify meat. Meat is cut into joints. Very well. He cuts it into joints!’

‘But that’s a bit of a skilled job, you know.’ Aubrey was wide awake now. ‘I mean, you can’t just pick up a butcher’s cleaver and hack about. It’s scientific. I’ve often watched them, and I bet it takes a bit of doing, not to speak of heaps of practice.’ He spoke decidedly.

‘Undoubtedly. But Savile had a chart hanging up in the studio. He used it to correct his drawings. It was a mass of red-ink dots and little crosses, and was annotated very freely. It was a human body with the skeleton marked in black, and had fainter lines showing the shape of the flesh on the bones. A most fascinating work. Oh, and Wright didn’t like to see me looking at it, I remember. That is interesting, too.’

‘But Savile looks such a miserable little dago,’ argued Aubrey. ‘Butchers are generally hefty lads.’

‘So is Savile.’ Mrs Bradley drew a vivid word-picture of Savile’s strength and muscular development.

‘Shouldn’t have thought it,’ said Aubrey. ‘Well, he had the strength, then. What else?’

‘The Stone. Apart from any question of motive from the viewpoint of revenge or gain, we get the fact that the Stone is the centre of some weird and wonderful legends. It may even have been a sacrificial altar in some remote age, as its name suggests. I wonder sometimes whether the urge to offer a human sacrifice upon it would not be motive enough for a mind like that of Savile to cause him to commit murder. It is a pleasing idea. Rather fantastic, perhaps. . . .’

‘Then, if you are right, Savile could have been the chap who must have been sneaking about in the woods that night and boned the suitcase while I’d gone up to the house,’ said Aubrey.

‘Yes. Undoubtedly. And it would fit in well with my theory of his guilt that he should have buried the fish with it and inscribed that peculiar legend upon the piece of paper. “A present from Grimsby” !’ She cackled with pleasure.

‘I see the inspector at the gate. I wonder whether they’ve tried to find the origin of that piece of paper?’ she continued, staring down the long garden path.

‘I don’t think they have. The chap kept trying to get me to confess I’d written it myself,’ said Aubrey. ‘Got quite huffy when I stuck to it that I knew no more about the bally paper than he did! But do you know who I think did that? Cleaver Wright. He’s just that sort of feeble ass, you know. I say, I think the inspector wants to speak to you. Oh, no. He’s gone. But I say! Wouldn’t what you say about Savile apply pretty equally to Wright? I mean, he’s a mad coot, isn’t he? And I could more easily imagine him killing a chap than that worm Savile. And he’s as strong as an ox, and he’s pretty keen on Lulu Hirst, too; and he’d think it a good jape to cut up the body and hang up the limbs like bits of meat! I can see him grinning all over his face at the thought of it! And we know he was in the Manor Woods that Sunday night with Margery Barnes, and we know she ran away from him. And then, the chap she saw crawling out of the bushes could not have been Sethleigh, so that it may have been the murderer. Had you thought of that?’

‘Ad nauseam,’ said Mrs Bradley, with no intention of snubbing him. ‘But then, child, don’t you see? If it was the murderer, then the murderer couldn’t have been Cleaver Wright, whom she’d just left in the clearing.’

‘Why not? He could have sneaked behind the bushes when she ran away from him, and started crawling out without noticing that she had run back to the clearing again.’

‘With what object should he hide himself then? You are not proposing to tell me that, in the few seconds whilst Margery Barnes was lost to sight, Cleaver Wright killed Sethleigh, hid the body, and crawled into the bushes and then out again, are you?’

‘Well, no, but –’

‘And if you are not telling me that, why then, if he was the murderer, that means he murdered Sethleigh at some time between five minutes to eight, when your mother saw Sethleigh and Redsey going into the woods together, and a quarter to nine, when he met Margery Barnes. Well, that part of the theory is tenable. After all, given reasonably favourable circumstances, it does not take long to kill a fellow-creature. But, supposing Wright did that, do you really think it conceivable that he immediately brought Margery Barnes to the spot where he had just committed the murder? And, even supposing that he were bold or foolhardy or coldblooded enough to return to the spot with the girl, why should he have fled to the “Queen’s Head” in that panic-stricken way and at once set about providing himself with an alibi? You see, I’m sure he saw the corpse in the woods that night, and he may have got blood from it on to his clothes. Of course, the fight with Galloway was a capital mistake. It was a confession that he knew of, even if he did not actually participate in, the crime.’

‘Knew of?’

‘Oh, yes. Cleaver Wright has been shielding somebody for a long time now. The curious part of it all is that I rather fancy he is shielding somebody who is not the murderer!’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘No. I expressed myself very badly, child. Take a concrete case. He is in love with Lulu Hirst. Suppose he imagined she had done it. She couldn’t possibly have done it, as a matter of fact –’

‘Why not?’

‘Wrong type, my dear. These passionate, tigerish, rather primitive persons don’t go about things so deliberately. All the details of the murder of Rupert Sethleigh have probably been planned for months. All that the