‘Oh, come now, auntie –’
‘Beatrice,’ supplied Mrs Bradley promptly.
‘Thank you, Beatrice. Ah, come now, Auntie Beatrice! Don’t talk like that. Come in quick, before you cause me to burst into tears. Look see! This is my dear little room.’
Mrs Bradley followed him into his studio. The first thing which took her eye was a large plan of a human skeleton, carefully annotated in small neat script and covered with red-ink dotted lines. She examined this plan with great interest.
‘Most informative,’ she said at last, after giving it a prolonged scrutiny.
‘Yes. Old Savile stuck that up and wrote the book of words. Thinks it helps him to draw pictures of gods and wood-nymphs! Heaven knows why. I find the thing rather revolting.’
He turned the elaborate chart with its face to the wall, and led her over to a stack of canvases.
‘And the model of Rupert Sethleigh’s head,’ said Mrs Bradley, when she had examined several oil-paintings and Wright had directed her attention to a small clay figure of a Roman gladiator. ‘Did you model that in here?’
‘That? Oh, yes. Funny business, that, you know. Deuce knows what happened to that skull. You heard, I suppose, that when the police johnnies broke up my model to get the skull out, they found a bally coconut inside? Most astounding! Well, it astounded me, anyhow! Most extraordinary thing. I couldn’t believe it. Thought the inspector was pulling my leg at first. But no!’
‘The silly part was,’ said Savile, who had entered behind them, and was once again the sleek-haired, sallow-complexioned, rather unpleasant person Mrs Bradley had met at Felicity’s tennis-party, ‘that the coconut itself was the one which our young friend –’
A sudden crash drowned the rest of his sentence.
‘Damn!’ said Cleaver Wright, picking up a dummy figure which had been seated in a rakish attitude on top of a tall pedestal. ‘I beg your pardon, Mrs Bradley, for the wicked word, but I’ve broked my poor dolly.’ He stroked the head of the repulsive object tenderly.
Mrs Bradley smiled, and involuntarily Cleaver Wright squirmed. He had seen the same gentle, anticipatory, patient smile on the face of an alligator in the London Zoological Gardens. It was a smile of quiet relish. It was the smile of the Chinese executioner. In spite of the afternoon’s warmth, Wright found himself shivering. He changed the subject hastily, and laid the dummy down.
‘I suppose the police have pretty well made up their minds that poor old Redsey killed his brute of a cousin?’ he asked.
Mrs Bradley raised her sparse, black brows.
‘Really?’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you should think that.’
‘Oh, one reads the papers,’ said Wright carelessly. ‘That’s all. Still, one is very glad one has a complete alibi, of course,’ he added, grinning wickedly, ‘as one is known to have disliked the chap oneself.’
‘A complete alibi?’ Mrs Bradley grimaced. ‘Then you’ve more than I have, young man. If the police came and asked me where I was on the evening of Sunday, June 22nd, I should be compelled to tell them that I was alone in the house from four-thirty until five minutes past eleven; that nobody called during that time; and that, had the spirit so moved me – which, in confidence, young man, I may inform you it did not! – I could have gone out and killed Rupert Sethleigh without a soul being any the wiser!’
She hooted with owl-like amusement. Cleaver Wright grinned.
‘Well, I’m better off than you,’ he said. ‘I went to the “Queen’s Head” for a nightcap, and got embroiled in a row with a great oaf of a farmer called Galloway. Didn’t finish the scrap until nearly closing-time. Choice, wasn’t it?’
‘Did you get hurt?’ asked Mrs Bradley.
‘Got pretty badly knocked about,’ said Wright carelessly. ‘Never mind.’ He grinned again.
‘And you bear Mr Galloway no malice?’ said Mrs Bradley musingly. ‘That is so nice, I think. It is what they call the true sporting feeling, isn’t it? They teach it at the Public Schools now, don’t they?’
Wright glared at her suspiciously. Women, especially ancient dames like this one, were fools, he knew. Yet was it possible – ? But Mrs Bradley’s wrinkled yellow face was mild and sweet as that of a grandmother – which, owing to the extreme distaste displayed by her only son for the whole female sex, she certainly was not! – and Wright was forced to the conclusion that – alas for the progress of feminism! – it was possible! The woman was an idiot. Why had he shivered when she smiled?
He grunted and moved towards the door. Mrs Bradley followed him, but on the way she paused at some shelves of books. On top of the bookcase was a fine array of silver sports trophies.
‘Old Savile’s, mostly,’ said Wright.
Mrs Bradley drew out her reading-glass and scanned the engraved inscriptions closely.
‘But you have two,’ she said, with a beam of senile futility. ‘How very nice! What did you do to win such lovely cups? Oh, and there’s a belt! How extremely amusing. What are they for?’
Wright shrugged his shoulders.
‘Oh, for boxing,’ he said carelessly. ‘About the only thing I’m any good at in the sports line.’
‘They are pretty things,’ said Mrs Bradley, even more fatuously than before. ‘You must be clever!’
When she had gone, Wright pulled on an old pair of boxing-gloves, made one or two preliminary sparring movements, and then, by way of relieving his feelings, measured the distance with his left hand and then with his powerful right he split a panel of the studio door from top to bottom.
III
Mrs Bradley entered the bar of the ‘Queen’s Head’ in some trepidation. It is not often that respectable elderly ladies, expensively, albeit hideously, clad in magenta silk dress, summer coat to match, large black picture hat (quite ludicrously unbecoming, the last-named, to Mrs Bradley’s beaky bird-like profile and sharp black eyes), walk into the bar of a public house. At the ‘Queen’s Head’ such an occurrence was absolutely unknown.
Wandles Parva (or those three-quarters of it which could command the entrance to the house of refreshment from the cover and vantage-point of the upstairs bedroom window) was keenly interested.
‘Be going to ask Billy Bondy for a subscription for the church, like?’
‘What, she? Never you need think so! Her don’t never go into church without it might be on a weekday like any of they heathenish Catholics, and then her only goes there-along to gape at the old door and the windies, like silly folks in they charries from London do come and do!’
Mrs Bradley addressed herself to the landlord, a small, alert, bright-eyed Cockney.
‘Kindly call to mind,’ she said, ‘the evening of Sunday, June 22nd.’
The landlord looked perplexed. Would there be any special reason – ‘Oh, ah! Of course! That there murder!’
‘No, not the murder. I heard rumours down in the village of a fight between –’
‘Alfred Owen Galloway, of this town, and what’s-his-name Wright, late of Somewhere Else,’ supplied the landlord humorously. ‘Quite right, mum. So there were. ‘Ere they stood, right in this very bar. We pushes back the old table to give ’em room. On my right, Mr Galloway. On my left, Mr Wright – only ’e’ appened to be all wrong that evening. There was no seconds as you’d notice, and the rules was ’ardly Queensberry, nor yet N.S.C. I acts as timekeeper, referee, stooards, manager and permoter, and Evening Star special reporter all at once. And at twenty past nine, mum, I starts ’em ’orf by me watch – Greenwich time.