The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (6 page)

‘And what I say is,' pronounced Mrs Eulalie Blenkins to the assembled meeting of mothers in the Chapel 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!'

‘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.'

Another Gardener

A
GAIN
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 enjoyed their visit but for two distressing and extraordinarily harassing thoughts. One was the thought of the spade he had hidden in his bed. It had been propped up against his wardrobe door and covered decently with his evening clothes until three o'clock that afternoon. He had planned to carry it down to dinner and rag Jim about it. But at three o'clock the police had arrived. They began asking for news of Rupert. There was bruited abroad the theory that Rupert had disappeared. It was rumoured that Jim Redsey had lied; that Rupert had never intended nor spoken of going to America. It was even darkly hinted that Jim Redsey could say a great deal about Rupert's whereabouts if he chose, but – with a significant pause – that he did not choose.

And there was an almost unrecognizable corpse down in Bossbury – fattish – aged about forty –

And Jim had dug a hole – rather like a grave – in the Manor Woods on the previous night. That was the second harassing thought.

And there was no doubt that Jim had got wind up – shocking wind up – especially when he saw the police coming up the drive!

Aubrey stood up. When in doubt, the old and experienced call canny. Youth is impetuous. Youth is inclined to be rash. Aubrey's rule, when he was seriously afraid of anything, was to make a wild dash at it. He had learnt to dive that way. He seized the spade and crept downstairs with it. He entered the drawing-room, whence came a narrow shaft of light beneath the door, and ‘stood easy' with the edge of the spade on the carpet.

‘Oh, Jim, old bird,' he said in an airy tone.

Jim Redsey, who was standing on the drawing-room hearthrug gazing earnestly at his reflection in an oval mirror which hung over the mantelpiece, turned with a start. His eye fell immediately upon the spade which Aubrey was holding.

‘What the devil is that?' he cried. His eyes were almost starting out of his head with terror, and, as he pointed to the cumbersome implement, his hand shook so badly that he lowered it in haste.

‘I hate to ask you, old lad,' said Aubrey pleasantly, ‘but, as man to man, and without prejudice on either side – where
is
that blighter Rupert?'

‘Those flannel bags,' said Cleaver Wright, laughing as well as he could with a badly swollen lip, ‘are. my flannel bags. Go and find your own moth-eaten and corruptible garments, and leave a gentleman's clothes alone.'

George William Savile smiled. His perfect teeth were his great pride. He smoothed down his already sleek and shining hair and held the garments in question up to the light.

‘Lulu,' he said, ‘I appeal to you. Are not those my trousers?'

‘Gawd only knows,' responded the lady, indolently raising herself from the bed on one perfect arm and eyeing the whole tableau, men and trousers alike, with great distaste. ‘And 'E won't tell,' she added, with the proverbial fatalism of the true Cockney. She slid down again and closed eyes that would have conquered Galahad. ‘And now get out, you –, – swine,' she said. ‘Both of you!'

Felicity Broome was in a quandary.

‘I suppose I ought to tell father,' she thought, ‘but really he's such a priceless old ass, he'd only go and tell the wrong people and get somebody into trouble.'

She looked at the clock. It was eleven p.m. ‘And it's at least ten minutes slow,' she reflected. ‘I wonder whether Aubrey is in bed? He's young, but he's awfully sensible. I'll talk it over with him, and see what he can suggest.'

She reconnoitred. All was well. She climbed out of her bedroom window, slid down the porch, and was soon at the gate.

After her experiences of the previous night, she felt nervous at the idea of traversing the Manor Woods. However, the way round by the lodge was so very much longer, and the thought of finding the gate closed when she eventually arrived there so disheartened her that she decided to summon all the resolution she possessed and dare the woodland path. She entered the little wicket gate, found the main path through the woods, and ran.

The drawing-room, like the library, looked out on to the lawn. Felicity saw a light shining through the curtains as she emerged from the darkness of the trees, and made directly for it. As she approached, she heard a heavy crash. Her heart leapt. Her pulses raced. Her head swam, and her knees knocked together. At the same instant the light went out, and Aubrey's boyish accents, raised in something between fear and horror, cried:

‘Cheese it, you stiff! You'll do me in, you fool!'