The Longer Bodies (30 page)

‘Wanted man. You should telephone to the police at Hilly Longer, perhaps.'

Ten minutes later the hungry Kost was being rushed in a police car back to old Mrs Puddequet's house, where he was hustled into the library. The first person he set eyes on was Miss Caddick.

‘Have you had breakfast, perhaps?' he demanded curtly. Miss Caddick smiled and nodded.

‘And, believe me or believe me
not
,' she giggled coyly, ‘I really did clock fifty on the Little Longer road.'

Kost, who thought she had been drinking, turned to a lynx-eyed Bloxham.

‘Breakfast, and I tell you all you ask,' he said abruptly. ‘But breakfast first, perhaps.'

‘
OH, WELL,' SAID
Mrs Bradley, with her dreadful grin, ‘you must give me credit for one thing, child, if for one thing only.'

‘And what is that?' enquired Bloxham cheerfully, for he was feeling exceptionally pleased with himself.

‘I've extorted a confession—a full confession—from the murderer,' replied Mrs Bradley calmly. ‘Would you care to hear it?'

‘If it can be substantiated it will save a good deal of time at the trial,' replied Bloxham, somewhat surprised by the answer to his question. ‘I take it, then, that they intend to plead guilty?'

‘At the trial? Oh, I should imagine that it is most unlikely,' Mrs Bradley replied.

She settled herself comfortably in the armchair which little Mrs Bloxham had placed for her, and untied the roll of manuscript she had brought.

‘I suppose the various members of Mrs Puddequet's family have returned to their homes?' she said, glancing over the sheets of foolscap and noting with approval the neat, precise writing with which they were covered.

‘Well, what with their trainer being in prison and old Mrs Puddequet being compelled to advertise for another companion-secretary, they hadn't much choice, I imagine,' said Bloxham. ‘Incidentally, I understand that the old lady, with her queer sense of humour, has promised to settle twenty-five thousand pounds on Caddick if she and Kost are declared not guilty at the trial.'

‘Really?' said Mrs Bradley drily. ‘How extremely tantalizing of her. Do they know?'

‘Oh, they know all right,' replied Bloxham, with a slight shrug. ‘Where would be the joke for the dear old lady if they didn't? Well, she'll keep her money all right, for our case is foolproof. Besides, if you are really holding in your hand the murderer's confession, that clinches it, doesn't it?'

‘Oh, undoubtedly,' replied Mrs Bradley. ‘You mean you don't want to hear it?'

‘Oh, carry on, by all means,' said Bloxham cordially. He fingered his pipe.

‘Do smoke,' said Mrs Bradley.

‘I can't think why he should have given the confession to you, of all people, if you'll excuse the observation,' said Bloxham. ‘It would have seemed more suitable for his solicitor to have had it, or even myself. How came he to hand it to you? Have you seen him since his arrest?'

‘Poor Kost! I've seen him, of course,' said Mrs Bradley, ‘and tried to cheer him up. He is an exceedingly dejected man. Miss Caddick takes it better. She visualizes herself as the heroine of a talkie who is placed for the moment in extremely unpleasant and dangerous circumstances. The talkies, however, always appear to believe in the happy ending, so she lives in hope of a speedy release!'

‘I'm sorry for Caddick,' said Bloxham frankly. ‘She's been the victim of circumstances and of falling in love with a villain.'

‘Kost?' enquired Mrs Bradley, grinning like a dragon.

‘Well, it's a pretty villainous thing to kill two men, one after the other,' said Bloxham. ‘But I'm keen on hearing the book of words. Is there much of it?'

‘Quite a little,' said Mrs Bradley quietly. ‘One comfort is that I can stop reading as soon as you get bored.'

She lay back in the big armchair, held the manuscript between her yellow claws, and began to read aloud.

‘“I was born in the year 1899,”' the manuscript began, ‘“and was more or less imperfectly educated. I was subjected, I suppose, to the usual physical, moral, and intellectual risks of youth and early manhood, and in due course I reached, without obvious mishap, the so-called years of discretion.

‘“Nothing noteworthy occurred to me until I decided in the year 1919 to found a new society. Since childhood I had belonged to a church club known to the environs of a certain respectable city as the Sons of Chivalry. Our
raison d'être
was to collect funds for the pauperization of the poor. This object, laudable as it may appear to some, highly immoral as it undoubtedly seems to others—for to give his fellow creatures something for nothing is the most profoundly and devastatingly demoralizing proceeding that man has yet inaugurated—was carried out by us under various charitable pretences. We had a coal and blanket fund, a babies' clothing fund, treats and parties were given to the youth of the neighbourhood, and charabanc outings were arranged for the adults.

‘“Upon reviewing the scope of our activities one night after I had acted as assistant chucker-out at a particularly disorderly bun-fight
cum
magic-lantern show, it struck me that as an agent for social service we were both unnecessary and out of date. I yearned to strike a modern note, and, above all, to found a society of real benefit to humanity. I was tired and disgruntled at the moment, and my one immediate desire was to fling myself down upon my bed—clothes, boots, and all—and go to sleep without the troublesome preparations which make the child—wisest of humans (one boy had thrown lumps of cake at the magic-lantern illustrations for ten minutes whilst I strove to determine in the darkness which was the offender and to eject him)—decide that when it grows up it will never go to bed at all.

‘“I was about to exchange my boots for slippers when the Great Idea sprang to my mind. Why not indulge the impulse? Why not lie down as I was and go to sleep? Why not—greater thought still!—disseminate the doctrine of indulging one's primitive impulses? Why not persuade my fellow-creatures to adapt the notion to their own uses?

‘“I will not claim for the society thus founded that its rules were unique, but they were not, perhaps, common to the majority of societies. We determined never to meet; to have no official premises; to have no subscription except that if letters were sent to me which seemed to call for a reply, a stamped addressed envelope was to be enclosed. I elected myself president and secretary. There were no other officials. I kept a complete list of members in triplicate. One of these lists I kept in my desk; another reposed with other of my private papers at the bank; the third was in the possession of the society's solicitors.

‘“We found it absolutely necessary to keep in close touch with our solicitors, because, from the very nature of the society, it was inevitable that our members should frequently come into violent contact with the law of the land. To begin with, there were the members—chiefly elderly gentlemen with extensive and reputable business connections —who looked to their membership of the society, and to all that that membership implied, to enable them to let off the steam and exuberance for which their daily life of painful decorum and swallowtailed respectability offered them no outlet. These greybeards took to hitting policemen over the helmet with their walking sticks, and to squirting soda-water on to the bald heads of fellow members of their London clubs. One man went so far as to seize a large plaice from its slab of ice at a fishmonger's shop and to smack it round the face of a particularly irritating female acquaintance who was in the act of changing her mind for the fourth time about the poultry she was having sent up for dinner whilst he waited his turn to be served.

‘“The subsequent police-court cases which followed these and similar interpretations of the Freudian gospel of anti-inhibitionism were handled extremely ably by our solicitors, who usually took the line of suggesting that the regrettable lapse was the result of a flippantly conceived wager. The bench, a singularly sporting fraternity, amiably conceded the point as a general rule, and the offenders were let off lightly, and lived to be better and happier men for having pandered to their primitive impulses in this carefree fashion.

‘“Our great difficulty was to deal with members who wanted to indulge an appetite for sadism or morbid cruelty. When such members were detected they were warned; for a second offence they were expelled from the society; if any further tales of their bestial behaviour came to our knowledge we handed the offenders over to the law, for it was very generally conceded that cruelty is not a primitive impulse, but is the product of a morbid, brooding, and unhealthy mind.

‘“Then we had our cases of theft following the impulse to obtain possession of a desired object. Most of the ‘kleptomania' cases reported in the daily papers between 1920 and 1930 were those in which our members were involved, and a certain distinguished psychologist, who shall be nameless, was presented with a handsome clock, bought out of thank-offerings voluntarily contributed by grateful persons as a tribute to his genius in inventing a term which covered their misdemeanours and mitigated the punishments dealt out by a paternal government for the same.

‘“Free love, with its attendant embarrassing consequences, also occupied the attention of our members, until the admission, on a sex-equality basis, of women to full membership of the society. This caused considerable readjustments to take place in matrimonial and connubial affairs, and husbands and wives, acting upon the intelligent conception that
x
sometimes equals
o
, returned to the paths of domesticity and virtue, until in the year 1928 the percentage of claimants for the Dunmow flitch exceeded all previous records by nearly two hundred per cent, a great tribute to the personal influence of our members, both male and female.

‘“Then we had our ‘occasional' cases—murder and the like. In this category I include the affair at the Grandat Theatre, when a sleeper in the stalls was set upon with vituperative violence by the author and slain by a blow on the head with a brass music stand which the murderer snatched out of the orchestral well. In this connection it is interesting to note that a leading musical-comedy actress performing in Paris was acquitted by a gallant but obviously biased French jury for throttling the author of the piece when he presumed to correct her pronunciation of the word ‘details.' The French, in their logical way, brought it in as a
crime passionelle
and, with their known admiration for the temperamental reactions of the highly strung, refused to proceed further with the matter. An occasion which caused us to feel pride in the activities of the society, and confidence that its doctrines were being disseminated with noteworthy success, was the lynching, by indignant members of a London audience, of two latecomers to the front row of the dress circle.

‘“Captious aunts and stingy uncles came in for a share of attention from our enthusiastic members; so did a brother aged eleven and the pet dog of a rich aunt; and a tram-conductor murdered a passenger who proffered a florin in payment of a penny fare. The ticket-punch—located by X-ray—was found to be completely embedded in the victim's skull. As a counteraction to this, there was the case of the incensed passenger who received two threepenny bits in his change, and murdered the conductor by suffocating him with his own woollen mittens. This happened in Glasgow, and a canny verdict of ‘Non-proven' was the result. Our member was publicly cheered.

‘“Of all the cases of murder with which we, as a society, were associated, however, that which won the greatest amount of admiration, approbation, and sympathy from our members—I received upwards of three hundred letters of congratulation on the subject, together with heavy subscriptions towards the cost of the defence—was that of a holiday-maker who saw a large ruddy man (in a bright-blue, double-breasted blazer with brass buttons, new dove-coloured flannel trousers, a polo-collared, white woollen sweater, and a loud tweed cap) standing on the top of Beachy Head admiring the Channel view. Our member, succumbing, I suppose, to the most overwhelming primitive impulse there is, crept behind him and pushed him heartily over the edge. The body was recovered by boat.

‘“Talking of murder brings me to the real reason for the writing of these memoirs.”'

Inspector Bloxham grunted.

‘Taken him some time to get to the point,' he said. ‘Fellow can write English better than he can speak it, too.'

‘Well, in a sense, yes,' Mrs Bradley agreed. ‘But, apart from that, it is interesting to pause here for a moment and notice the impression of the man's character that we get in those few pages I have read to you.'

‘He certainly has no respect for human life whatsoever,' said Bloxham, nodding his head. He knocked out his pipe and proceeded to refill it. ‘Apart from that, though—'

‘You agree, then, that the writer might possess criminal tendencies?' said Mrs Bradley, grinning in her terrifying, because mirthless, and apparently meaningless, way.

‘Tendencies?' cried Bloxham. ‘The man's an out-and-out bad lot, I should say! The idea of murder appears to
amuse
him!'

‘Well, from some points of view, it is amusing, of course,' said Mrs Bradley briskly. She turned again to the manuscript. ‘The style of writing changes at this point,' she added. ‘The murderer is about to chronicle his own deeds of which he is inordinately proud.'

She continued the reading:

‘“My own chance to prove that I was worthy to be the inaugurator, president, and secretary of this great society came on Friday, April eighteenth, of this present year.”'

‘Ah!' said Bloxham. ‘Here it comes!'

Mrs Bradley nodded, and went on:

‘“I was enjoying the quiet hours of the evening in my own way, doing ill to none, and improving the pleasantest part of the day and my own mind at one and the same time, when my peace was disturbed by a loud, drunken, raucous, masculine voice below, uncultured, heavy, bullying, thick with beer and anger, bellowing the name of Puddequet. Interested, for it was by order of the ancient lady who bore that name that I worked and sweated daily at an oafish task—”'