The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop

Parlour, ‘I say it’s a judgment on Henry Binks. A man was never meant to make his living out of killing the dumb animals and offering their carcasses for sale. I’m a vegetarian myself, though I can’t persuade Robert into it, I’m sorry to say. I was converted to it when I lived in Blackwater. A good mistress she was, and not hard to please. “But there’s one thing, Sarah,” she says – not liking to call me Eulalie as it’s such a mouthful, and disliking Polly as being a sort of a skittish name, so she always called me Sarah, which is not unsuited to me, Robert’s second name being Abraham – “there’s one thing,” she says, “that I can’t abide. And that’s butcher’s meat,” she says. “We’re all vegetarians here, and Christian Science too,” she says, “and if you’ll promise to be likewise, well, I like your looks,” she says, “and I’d like to give you the place.” So vegetarian I been ever since, though I stuck out about the Christian Science on account of being a Wesleyan, and you can’t get your money from the State Insurance, you see, without a certificate from the doctor.’

An older woman leaned forward.

‘But what’s all this got to do with Henry Binks?’ she asked. ‘A very respectable man. Sober, too.’

‘He hasn’t done nothing that I know of. At least,’ amended Mrs Blenkins piously, ‘I hope it isn’t him that’s done it. It’s what he found.’ She lowered her voice to a blood-curdling whisper. ‘Human joints, my dear, all hanging up on the hooks where he generally hangs his beef and lamb on a Tuesday morning!’

There was a hushed and horrified silence, and a long pause. Then one bold spirit, running her needle in and out of the seam of a nightshirt destined to cover the nakedness of darkest Africa, enquired breathlessly:

‘Human joints? Why, whatever do you mean, Polly Blenkins?’

Mrs Eulalie Blenkins glanced around her. The minister’s wife and the rather dull book from which she was accustomed to read aloud to the assembled sisterhood of matrons had not yet put in an appearance, so Polly hitched her chair a little more closely to the questioner’s and replied softly, while the rest of the circle also hitched up their chairs and strained their ears and paused in their work to listen:

‘Yes. This morning first thing he found them. Of course, Henry Binks lives over his shop in the Purley Road, and he has also got the lease of a lock-up butcher’s shop in the market, although the lock-up still goes under the name of Smith, which was old Tom Smith as used to live over Border’s the grocer’s in Queen Street. He’s gone now, poor old man, and Henry Binks that took over the lease of the lock-up in the market has never troubled himself to have the name painted out and his own put there instead. Well, Monday not being a good day in his line of business, Henry Binks never troubles to go down and open the lock-up till Tuesday, but every Monday he just contents himself with selling a few odds and ends at the shop in the Purley Road. Well, first thing this morning, then, being Tuesday, he goes down to the market shop, leaving his wife and son to manage the Purley Road shop as usual, and what does he find?’

She paused, with true dramatic instinct.

‘I tell you what Henry Binks found,’ she said. ‘He found a body, a human body, all cut up into joints as neat as he could have done it himself, and all hung up on his hooks, as he could see when he took down the shutters. His very tools had been used to do the job and everything, so folks do say. The police is keeping them for fingerprints, my young nephew told me. An ’orrible sight it must have been! They say when Henry Binks see what it all was he fainted dead away, butcher though he is!’

III

‘Fingerprints? We took hundreds of ’em. Identify the corpse? We can’t, not yet awhile. Hold Henry Binks? On what charge? Oh, he’s under observation, all right. You needn’t worry. But there’s nothing to arrest him for. Scotland Yard? ’Ere, you clear out of this, quick, else I’ll run you in for obstruction!’

The only reporter the Bossbury Sun could afford grinned cheerfully at the harassed constable who had been left in charge of Henry Binks’s little lock-up shop in the Bossbury covered market, and walked away briskly. The usual crowd of morbid persons who immediately rush to any locality where murder has been committed were lined up in front of the shop, anxious to be at the scene of one of the more unsavoury and horrifying crimes of the decade. The constable, having got rid of the young reporter, fixed his eye on a market sign which hung about three feet above the heads of the sightseers and resumed his stand-at-ease position. He wondered what credit – if any – would accrue to him for having been first on the scene after Henry Binks the butcher had made his appalling discovery that morning.

‘Pity the murderer had the sense to take the head away with him,’ mused Constable Pearce. ‘Then we’d have known who the dead man is, and could have gone on according.’

His superiors, Superintendent Bidwell, the deputy chief constable of the county, and Inspector Grindy, who had been placed in charge of the case, were discussing the same point.

‘Damned nuisance about the head,’ said Superintendent Bidwell. ‘He’s left us everything else, including the innards. He might as well have left the head, and saved us a lot of trouble.’

The inspector guffawed heartily at what he took to be a feeble but well-intentioned jest on the part of his superior officer.

‘No, I mean it,’ said the superintendent. ‘You see, it is going to be a brute of a case. To begin with, the murdered man is obviously a gentleman. Bath every day sort of look those limbs have got, if you noticed. And the hands and feet are well kept. Then look at the cleverness of dismembering the corpse in a butcher’s shop! Nobody wonders what the chopping noise is for. It’s the butcher getting ready for the next day’s sales. Nobody is surprised to see a natty little car or what-not drive up to the market entrance and deliver stuff at any of those lock-up shops. As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose there was anybody there to wonder or not to wonder. Once inside the shop, the chap had only to shove on Henry Binks’s apron and overalls which he leaves hanging up in the shop when he goes home on Saturday night, because his wife won’t wash ’em on account of the bloodstains, which turn her up, she says, so the laundry calls for the things on Wednesdays – and there you are!’

‘Looks like a local fellow,’ said the inspector. ‘Special knowledge and all that. See what I mean?’

‘If it isn’t,’ said the superintendent decidedly, ‘– or, at least, if the dead man isn’t a local chap, I’m not going to have anything to do with the case. I’ll hand it over to the county where he belongs, or to Scotland Yard. I don’t care which it is. A murder case is always dirty work, and in a case of this kind, where you’ve got to establish identity before you can get down to anything else at all, it’s the very devil, and a confounded waste of time.’

‘Yes, the identification is going to be a tough proposition,’ said the inspector. ‘It isn’t only the head. There isn’t even a mark or a scratch on the body that you could use to prove it was anybody in particular. It’s fattish and youngish – the doctor puts it as forty years old – and it’s been well cared for. That’s as much as you can say. Well, I’d better start by finding out who is missing. Then I shall have to check them all up, and perhaps we shall get on to something.’

‘As to that,’ said the superintendent, drawing out a paper, ‘you needn’t bother about any of these. We know about ’em. All except this chap. Seems to be some sort of mystery here. He’s the big bug at Wandles Parva, you know. Sethleigh. Suddenly taken it into his head to go to America, but nobody seems to know anything about it. His aunt, a Mrs Bryce Harringay, reported on the matter by letter this morning. You’d better go and look her up. Here’s her description of him. It might fit the corpse.’

CHAPTER V

Another Gardener

I

AGAIN it was night. Tuesday night. Aubrey Harringay, who, to use his own expression, had ‘snooped under the mater’s bally bed and scared away the beetles, bogies, bugs and burglars for her’, retired at eleven-ten to his own room and lovingly turned back the bedclothes. Reposing secretly and a little grimly between the sheets was the spade he had brought back as the spoils of war and the relic of his adventures on the previous night. Aubrey drew it out, laid it gently on the rug, and remade the bed. Then he squatted down beside it, and pondered.

Aubrey was an intelligent boy. As he pondered he would have whistled but for fear of disturbing his mother. He was not actuated altogether by feelings of filial affection in not wishing to disturb his mother. Some men and women, he knew, were at their best in a crisis. Others were not. He sensed that Mrs Bryce Harringay must inevitably remain in the second of these categories. A crisis, he also sensed, had been reached. The police had been nosing about the house all the afternoon. They had asked questions. They had turned out all Rupert Sethleigh’s letters and papers. They had driven the cook to hysterics and the butler to blasphemy. Aubrey himself would have