Authors: Gladys Mitchell
"You mean ...?"
"Supposing, for the sake of the argument, that she did murder him, did he die just where he was found?"
"There was no evidence offered to the contrary by the prosecution, but I see what you mean. There were some very rum stories round the village—probably rot, but you never quite know—about cries and moans and what-not, a day or two after the death, by the way. But I only got that on the side. It didn't come out at the trial."
Mrs. Bradley was silent for about a minute. Then she said :
"It seems to me that Bella Foxley was arrested on insufficient evidence."
"Not if you read what the wife said at the inquest. She practically accused Bella Foxley of the murder, and the coroner's jury brought in a verdict accordingly. She let out—only, of course, it had to be suppressed—that she believed the real motive was that Tom knew Bella had murdered the ancient aunt. He was murdered to shut his mouth, and to put an end to the blackmail. She wanted to shout the same thing at the trial, and it was with the greatest difficulty that she could be persuaded to be quiet about it, because, of course, the aunt's death was all signed up and generally accounted for by the local doctor, and as there was no question of poison or violence, and the death certificate was in order, it was hardly possible to drag it up again. Would have meant an exhumation order and all that, so, although the prosecution knew all about her ideas on the subject, they didn't feel they could possibly admit her theories—because, dash it, that's all they were !—as part of the evidence."
"I see," said Mrs. Bradley. "The wife appears to have adopted a very biased, not to say spiteful, attitude towards Bella. It seems odd, considering that Bella had benefited them since she had come into the money."
"I know. I think she really had got a bee in her bonnet about Bella's having been the murderess, but I believe she thought, too, that there was something between Bella and her husband. Anyway, she was so much incensed against her that one of the solicitors told me the prosecution had grave doubts about calling her at all. They were afraid she would prejudice their case. Juries detest a spiteful witness, and rightly. Spite and truth are never too closely related, even though the one may be based upon the other."
"How true," said Mrs. Bradley, sighing. "And I suppose, whether she murdered her cousin or not, there isn't much doubt that Bella really did murder the aunt?"
Mr. Pratt shrugged and smiled.
"One thing I can tell you," he said. "We were all after her for her story when she was acquitted, but she wouldn't give us anything at all. Said she wanted to get away and be at peace."
"She went to her sister, I suppose."
"Well, no. Some of the reporters lay in wait for her there, but, although the house was fairly persistently haunted, she did not turn up."
"How long after the trial did she commit suicide?"
"Oh, about a year. She took a cottage—two cottages turned into one, it was—not far from the New Forest. The reporters trailed her, but she still held out on them, and after a week or two she ceased to be news, of course, and so they went away. She didn't become news again until she committed suicide, and then she only got a line or two, because most people had forgotten all about her by then. Funnily enough, she had then joined forces with the sister. They were living together when it happened."
"Really?" There was a lengthy pause.
"She may have murdered the cousin, but she hadn't dismembered the body," said Mrs. Bradley, referring to the fact that a fickle populace had so soon forgotten Bella. "That always keeps a murderer's memory green. The public has a passion for horrors; although how they think most murderers can dispose of a body neatly and successfully without dismembering it I can't imagine."
"The haunted house was the only interesting and unusual feature in Bella Foxley's case," said Mr. Pratt. "But, you know, some quite ordinary murders remain in people's memories. Take the case of Jessie M'Lachlan, for instance...."
"The details were inclined to be unsavoury," Mrs. Bradley remarked. "And, of course, from the criminologist's point of view, what a beautiful case! You have not chosen a good example. Two hundred years hence the case of Jessie M'Lachlan will still fascinate, tease, beckon, and defeat the student of crime. It was a case in a million. No, not even that. I believe it is, and always will be, unique."
The conversation turned easily, from this statement, to a discussion of the verdict in the case of Ronald True, and the problem in English law of the criminal lunatic; the eternal query in the case of Madeleine Smith; the vexed question of Thomson and Bywaters; and the talk continued into the small hours.
The next day was Sunday, and at half-past five in the evening the guest departed regretfully for London.
On Monday morning Mrs. Bradley telephoned her son.
"I am eaten up with curiosity," she said. "Can't you find me somebody else who was mixed up with it all?"
"Would one of the jurors do?" Ferdinand inquired. "I think I could get you a perfectly good juror. As a matter of fact, he's my barber."
"Ah, an artist. Most satisfactory. When and where?"
"I'll tell him you're coming, and let you know the arrangements. I suppose your time is your own?"
"Better than that: my time is his," said Mrs. Bradley. She hung up and rang for Henri. Her cook appeared, preceded, in the manner of the Cheshire cat's grin, by an expression of marked anxiety.
"Ze 'addock, madame?" he enquired, spreading his hands disconsolately. "What I 'ave said to ze fishmonger!"
"No, no, Henri, dear child! This has nothing to do with the haddock, which was eaten in its entirety by Mr. Pratt. It is simply this: do you know any hairdressers?"
Henri gazed at her stupefied. Then he began to talk in French and continued to do so for nearly ten minutes.
"Ah," said Mrs. Bradley, who was old-fashioned enough to believe that French is the most civilised language on earth (except, possibly, for Chinese, which she did not know), "then you will agree with me, Henri, when I suggest that a hairdresser must be, of necessity, an artist."
Henri agreed in another burst of idiomatic rhetoric. His employer nodded and dismissed him. Next day Ferdinand rang up to say that his barber, whose name was Sepulle, would be delighted to recall, for her benefit, his experiences at the trial of Bella Foxley.
Mrs. Bradley met the barber in a room at the back of his shop. It was during business hours, but that, said Mr. Sepulle, mattered nothing. He himself had no appointments that afternoon, gentlemen being, on the whole, more prone to the 'drop-in' than to making appointments, and as to serving on a jury, well, appointments or no appointments, that had had to receive attention before anything.
Not that it was altogether a waste of time, he continued; no, he should be sorry for anybody to think he thought that. We all had a duty, and ought to be prepared to face it. No shirking; that was his motto, peace or war. And it had been a very interesting case, although, in his opinion, it had been 'messed up.'"
"Messed up?" Mrs. Bradley inquired.
Well, there was this woman, Bella Foxley, brought in and charged with the wilful murder of her cousin, and pleading 'Not Guilty,' and then a whole lot of disagreement among a lot of doctors, and then all this stuff about Reasonable Doubt from the judge when the evidence had been completed, and then the jury sent out to consider their verdict.
"We were out about an hour and three-quarters," concluded Mr. Sepulle, "arguing the point, with seven of us for an acquittal and five against. I was against."
"Why?" asked Mrs. Bradley. The barber had believed Bella Foxley to be guilty because he did not like her face. That, surely, was not part of the evidence, Mrs. Bradley suggested, but he denied this. Her appearance was a fact, he protested, and, as such, it had importance. Then he added that the police knew what they were doing when they arrested her. To this Mrs. Bradley agreed, but very cautiously. What, in the end, she enquired, caused the five jurors who were against an acquittal to join those seven who were in favour ?
Well, Mr. Sepulle had always believed that there were two ways of looking at everything, and the judge
had
stressed giving the prisoner the benefit of the doubt. The doubt in his own mind, he confessed, was rooted in the story that the house was naunted. He did not believe in haunted houses, he explained. Why should not the 'ghost' have committed the murder, and, that being so, there was nothing to suggest that the ghost had been Bella Foxley. Then there was the question of the time. That was extremely important. The medical evidence—not contested by the defence—suggested that death had taken place between eleven o'clock at night and two in the morning. Well, this Bella Foxley was supposed to have been visiting her cousin at this haunted house between those times. The wife swore to it.
Now, he, (Mr. Sepulle), was a married man, and what he wanted to know was, was it likely that a wife was going to let some other woman go gallivanting off at that time of night to visit her husband in an empty house? She had done it once— granted. And, funny enough, the chap fell out of the window. But did it seem reasonable to suppose that the wife would let her do it more than once? Was it sensible to suppose the wife would have it? Not on your life it wasn't. Scared of the haunted house she might have been—thin, whining little thing—but she'd be a darn sight more scared of having some other woman larking about in an empty house with her husband, or he (Mr. Sepulle) was no judge of women.
Then, again, would the prisoner really have been such a mutt as to repeat herself like that? And then, that blackmail stuff. That got nowhere with him. When you talked of blackmail you meant really fleecing people—draining them and draining them like a foul leech sucking blood. You didn't mean a little bit of a five pound note here and there from a woman who'd got a sackful of the ready, and was sweet on the chap anyway.
"So there it was," Mr. Sepulle concluded. "I swallowed my doubts and gave her the benefit of them."
"And how did she take the verdict?" asked Mrs. Bradley, somewhat overcome by Mr. Sepulle's piling of Pelion upon Ossa by following his ripe simile with an unimaginable metaphor.
"She said her prayers," replied the barber, "and, somehow, that seemed to me unnatural."
"Interesting," said Mrs. Bradley. "And was she—in spite of the fact that you did not like her appearance—a striking-looking woman? Should you know her anywhere, as the saying is?"
"She was nothing much to look at," the barber replied, "except she was big and heavy enough to have done it. One of those local permanent waves, and not set fit to speak of, but perhaps she'd had no chance to do much with it while she was awaiting her trial. I am not informed as to that, although you'd have thought that anybody would just have gone in and touched it up for such an important occasion."
"Ah!" said Mrs. Bradley, interested in this professional point of view.
"Yes. About a twenty-five to a thirty-shilling touch," the barber continued. "Not that I do ladies now, but I used to be a ladies' hairdresser when my old father was alive. Ours is a family business, you see, and he always did the gentlemen himself, right up to the last. He only retired four years back, and died last year, so I got a good knowledge of the ladies' side of the business, being in it twenty-two years, and also of all the other little extras that go with it, manicure, face-packs—Ah, and that reminds me, speaking of this Bella Foxley. She could have done with a mud-pack or two herself, and some mercolised wax, but that's neither here nor there."
Mrs. Bradley rang up Mr. Pratt and invited him to spend another week-end at the Stone House. Mr. Pratt accepted gracefully, and on the following Friday evening came down from London in time for dinner.
"More Foxleyana?" he inquired, lighting one of the special cigars selected by Ferdinand for his mother's guests (including himself) and then lying back in the very comfortable chair. "What have you been doing since I left you here last time?"
"Talking to my son on the telephone, and to his barber in person," Mrs. Bradley replied. "The barber was on the jury which acquitted Bella Foxley."
"The deuce he was!" said Mr. Pratt, deeply interested. "Did he give any special reason for the acquittal?"
"It appears that the judge was in the prisoner's favour and almost instructed the jury to bring in the verdict which was pronounced as the result of the trial. The barber himself was not at first in favour of acquitting her. He thought her face was against her."
"So it was, but that's not evidence."
"He said it was. After all, he is a student of personal appearance, don't forget."
Mr. Pratt chuckled.
"I've brought a book with me," he said. "It's the reminiscences of Cotter, the prosecuting counsel in the Foxley case. He's got a chapter—half a chapter, actually—about Bella. I thought you might like to read it. I don't agree with all he says, but there's no doubt that if they could only have proved motive (which, he hints, they could have done if only they could have referred to the death of the aunt) they would have got Bella hanged all right."
"So the prosecution had got hold of the grated carrot, had they?" said Mrs. Bradley. "From the report of the inquest, I suppose?"
"Must have been—unless one of their witnesses spilt a few beans in private which they couldn't very well spill in court."
Meanwhile, there was Mr. Cotter's book, and whilst the ex-journalist and Ferdinand played golf on Sunday morning, she spent an interesting time with
Catalogue of Crime
(a handsome twelve and sixpenny volume), and obtained, she told Ferdinand later, Counsel's opinion upon the case.
The eminent gentleman had intended a popular book, and had attempted to govern his literary style in accordance with this aspiration. His matter, however, was sufficiently interesting to be erected on almost any foundation or to carry almost any superstructure, and she not only read his remarks upon the Foxley case (to which he had given the title
Ghaists or Bogles or——
), but his reports and remarks upon a dozen other cases, with close interest.