‘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 is your father!’
‘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 must see him! Tell him it’s about the murder, Mary Kate. That ought to fetch him!’
‘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 cried in a loud voice rich with direful woe:
‘Glory be to God, your honour’s reverence, Mr Broome! There’s Mistress Margery from the doctor’s house below does be after saying she’s done the murder herself itself entirely!’
‘Where is Miss Margery?’ enquired the vicar.
‘Sure, herself is below stairs waiting on your reverence.’
‘And don’t call me your reverence! I’ve told you before that I am not of the Roman persuasion.’
‘More’s the shame to you, then,’ retorted Mary Kate, recovering her wonted poise with speed and certainty, ‘that you wouldn’t be an honest Christian man – and you to be baptizing the babes and burying the old people and all!’
The vicar, as usual, was left without the honours of war, and Mary Kate retired in triumph from the study. She returned in two minutes and ushered in a stammering and shame-flushed Margery Barnes.
‘Please, may I shut the door?’ she asked timidly when Mary Kate had departed. ‘I – what I have to say is absolutely private. I don’t – nobody else – I couldn’t let everybody know.’
The Vicar of Wandles Parva laid down his pen and turned to face her. Without meeting his quizzical gaze, Margery went over to the door and closed it.
‘Now then,’ said the Reverend Stephen. ‘What’s all this? Some dark deed, or what?’
‘It’s partly about me and partly about somebody else,’ said Margery, looking past him and collecting her thoughts, and – or so it seemed to the vicar – her courage. He looked at her, half amused, and saw a red-faced, slightly perspiring, fair-haired, short-skirted, ingenuous maiden of eighteen, curiously like – who was she curiously like? He frowned. Margery caught his eye, and avoided it again.
‘Mr Broome,’ she said at last, ‘do you think – I mean, there’s no chance of Jim Redsey being arrested, is there? You hear such horrible rumours down in the village about him.’
‘I don’t know.’ The vicar looked thoughtful. ‘I believe there’s a good deal of evidence against him. He’ll have to stand his trial if he is arrested, of course, unless anything turns up to point out the real murderer. It is a very nasty, puzzling business, this murder; isn’t it? I shouldn’t think too much about it, if I were you.’
‘You don’t believe Jim Redsey did it, do you, Mr Broome? I can see you don’t! Oh, I’m so glad!’
‘Why, no, I don’t believe he did it. And you don’t believe it either, I see.’ The Reverend Stephen Broome picked up his pen and rustled some papers suggestively. But Margery refused to be turned out of the study by the feeble hints of work to be done. She crossed one thick, sturdy leg over the other and leaned forward confidentially.
‘I know he didn’t do it,’ she said unexpectedly.
‘What?’ The vicar looked startled.
Margery nodded her head emphatically.
‘If I – if I tell you what I know, will you back me up with Father?’ she demanded.
‘What have you been up to, then?’ The vicar laid down his pen and began to fill his pipe.
‘I’ll tell you.’
She uncrossed her legs, leaned forward, with her elbows among the vicar’s scattered sermon papers, and began.
‘Rupert Sethleigh was supposed to have been killed on Sunday night, June 22nd, wasn’t he? And, at about nine o’clock, Jim Redsey was in the “Queen’s Head”. Well, if anybody saw Rupert Sethleigh alive after Jim Redsey had knocked him down and gone off and left him for dead, would it prove that Jim was not – would they – I mean, they couldn’t think Jim did it then, could they?’