Corpses in Enderby (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery) Read online

  The man with the mattress cocked a thumb in the direction of the music and spoke to Littlejohn.

  “That’s Blowitt. Must be in the dumps. Always plays the pianner when he’s low. Played in an Army orchestra once’t … No good in a pub, though, that sort o’ stuff. Over the patrons’ ’eads, you might say.”

  The difficult, swirling music continued.

  5

  THE TRIBE OF JERRY BUNN

  HAD Ned Bunn known what would happen at his inquest, he would have been very annoyed. In life, he loved being made a fuss of; in death, it looked as if they were trying to settle it all and get him buried with as little publicity as possible. Nobody except the family, the necessary officials, and a sleepy local reporter knew when and where the inquest was to be held and they did not noise it abroad because of its unsavoury nature. In fact, all the Bunns feared that more horrible things would come to light and disgrace them.…

  The Coroner was a man called Surtees Green and he looked it. As he sat on his rostrum, he seemed to be in the throes of a rough Channel crossing and his complexion matched his name. A thin faggot of a fellow, whose wife had bullied all the spirit out of him; so much so, that he kept glancing over his shoulder and peering myopically into the distance to make sure she wasn’t there. Littlejohn, sitting with the rest of the officials in the well of the court, looked from the Coroner to the public places and back again; it reminded him of a gathering of a strange religious sect. The Bunn family were all there, except the second cousins, two small boys named Enoch and Caleb, who were away from home at a denominational boarding-school.

  Jasper Bunn gave evidence of identification. He wore a frock coat and carried a top hat, which he took with him into the box and balanced on the ledge whilst he took the oath. He then coughed in his hat, testified, and looked angry when told to step down. Jasper had been rehearsing the part he would play as head of the clan in the proceedings. He was going to deliver a kind of funeral oration on his late brother, but Mr. Green, after a furtive squint over his shoulder, slipped a bismuth lozenge in his mouth and said that would be all.

  “If I may be permitted…”

  “Later, later …”

  Jasper returned to the pew where his family awaited with sympathetic looks. They were all dressed in black; Mrs. Jasper Bunn, née Louisa Freer, a fat fair woman who had once been very good looking and the belle of Salem Protestant Chapel, but who now resembled a feather-bed, took up two seats. She ate a lot of chocolates and read romantic novels. In days past, the affair of Jasper and Louisa had been the romance of Salem and, in spite of the sanctimonious nature of the courtship, had ended in a rush for the altar, for little Paul was already on the way. Paul, now grown-up, was sitting beside his mother, lanky, very swarthy, pug-faced, heavy jowled, and with a stiff growth of beard which needed removing twice a day, but never was, hence giving him the look of a pious burglar. His brother, Silas, sat beside him and resembled him, although in a feebler mould, for he had been a backward boy and a great trial to his parents. Their wives were insignificant echoes of their husbands and had been told to stay away. Paul’s wife, Leah, the mother of Enoch and Caleb, now and then rebelled against authority and took to gin, a phenomenon which was explained away at church as migraine.

  Jasper Bunn sat down next to his wife, mopped his brow, put his hat on the floor and examined all his buttons to see if they were right. Then he pushed away his wife’s comforting hand, which was a sign that there was trouble brewing. He and his two sons had public-spiritedly absented themselves from their successful business of making eyelet-holes for shoelaces, and this was what they got!

  Wilfred Flounder had been sworn and was now telling his tale for the fourteenth time.

  “Speak up,” said Mr. Green. The result made the Coroner hold his hands over his ears. “I said speak … not yell your head off.”

  Bertha and Wilfred sat apart from the rest of the family, who were only half on speaking-terms with them. Bertha wore a ready-made tweed costume and a green hat with a pheasant’s feather waving above it; Wilfred was in a multiple-tailored brown suit and a green tie. This show of disrespect for the dead had further angered Mr. Jasper, who had sworn to have a “few words” with them afterwards, a masterpiece of understatement, for once started, Jasper never knew when to stop.

  “It was dark in the street and I couldn’t make out what was going on. My glasses were running with rain, too.”

  “Wait a minute … I’ve got to take all this down.”

  Mr. Surtees Green, using a quill pen, scratched and scrawled and looked over his shoulder and at the distant door.

  “Go on.”

  At this point, a dog entered the court and proceedings were suspended.

  “What have we come for? I do think we ought to have been called before him”.

  Sarah Agnes Fearns, née Bunn, and briefly called Sr’Agnes, thought she was whispering to her husband but her voice rose like a dull chant.

  “Silence in Court!”

  Sr’Agnes was the tall, scraggy elder sister, around whom centred all the resistance to Wilfred Flounder. She had a pale, heavy face, the pugnacious pug-nose and heavy jaw of the Bunns, and she wore a shapeless black costume, black stockings and black gloves. On her head was a small hat of lacquered straw. It looked as if good taste, having been stifled whilst the rest of her clothing was being chosen, had suddenly recovered and insisted on being represented by the hat, which made all the rest look shoddy. Her husband, John Fearns, sat with her, a small slip of a man, with dark eyes, a sensitive face and a ready smile. Side by side with his wife, he looked like the mate of a predatory female spider, ready to be devoured when his functions had been fulfilled. If you’d asked him why he ever married Sarah Agnes Bunn, Fearns would have been at a loss to explain, but, in her younger days, she had been good-looking in a ferocious amazonian kind of way; Fearns, who attended Salem Chapel, had been chosen, enmeshed, and married before he quite knew what he was doing. She had borne him three children. Barnabas, who was never mentioned, for he had at the age of nineteen gone abroad with a doctor’s wife, aged twenty-nine, and had never been seen again. Henry, their second son, was with them; smaller than his father, light on his feet, and locally known as Little Titch. Their daughter, Helen, had been told to stay at home. By some freak of nature, she was phenomenally beautiful and upset the men wherever she went. This was a constant thorn in her mother’s flesh, for, instead of being proud of it, she somehow had the idea that in bringing such a lovely snare into the world, she had assisted the devil in his work.

  “We carried him indoors…”

  Flounder, adjusting his speed to Mr. Surtees Green’s quill pen, dawdled on and on under the malevolent eyes of the Bunns and the encouraging nods of Bertha, who had been weeping and whose face resembled a boiled pudding therefrom.

  Here again the proceedings were interrupted. A noise like the hooves of a lot of cattle was heard on the marble floor of the ante-room and a cheerful chirping voice was raised, explaining something to the usher.

  “We thought it started at half past eleven … Was it eleven?”

  “Silence!”

  There was a pause and then the hooves resumed their tapping. Down the passage, across the well of the court, and to the vacant seats on the other side.

  “Late again! Always late!”

  A stage whisper from Sr’Agnes echoed round the rafters. The recipients of the criticism were not in the least put-out. They bobbed and bowed to the rest of those present, made an awful noise getting in their pews, selected seats, changed them, and giggled at their own discomfiture. Mr. Green flung his quill pen into the well of the court in a rage. His seasick-looking cheeks turned a dull mauve.

  “And what, might I ask, is the meaning of this gross disrespect to my court?”

  Somebody retrieved the pen and handed it back. Mr. Green, who was prone to little fits of temper, flung it from him again.

  “We thought it started at half past, instead of on the hour. We’re all sorry.�
��

  There was a murmur of concurrence from the newcomers which sounded like ‘hear’ ‘hear’.

  “So you ought to be! What are you all doing here, anyhow?”

  “We’re close relatives of the deceased.”

  “That is no excuse for arriving at this hour. We’re nearly finished. Sit down. Where’s my pen? Has anybody seen my pen?”

  Mr. Jubal Medlicott sat down. He was the husband of Ned Bunn’s younger sister, a little, nondescript woman, who in her early days had been pretty and clever, but who had deteriorated under the struggle of making ends meet. Her husband kept the only first-class tailor’s and outfitter’s in the town, and it had declined in the teeth of competition. Mr. Jubal Medlicott had not declined with it. In appearance, at least, he kept his head above water. Every morning this little, dark-eyed, brisk, elderly man, with a close-clipped beard and gold-framed spectacles, started from home in a natty grey suit, a foulard bow-tie, a flower in his coat (placed there by one or the other of his ugly twin daughters), white spats over his shoes and a grey soft hat on his head, escorted by his two girls to the shop, where they all worked. He couldn’t afford to employ the girls, really, but he loved them too much to turn them out to work elsewhere. The Bunn family gazed with astonishment as Jubal entered in his pearly grey business suit with a large chrysanthemum in the buttonhole.

  Mrs. Jubal Medlicott was born Anne Bunn and theirs had been a love match. From the day Medlicott, the new assistant-cutter in the tailor’s business he eventually bought with his wife’s money, entered Bunn’s shop with a rose in his buttonhole to buy a pair of scissors, she had loved him to the exclusion of all else. She was in her early twenties then and managed the shop during her father’s frequent absences in search of business. Although in his dandified fashion, Medlicott had run through her little fortune, been frequently unfaithful, and left her to worry about his mania for squandering money and aversion to hard work, she still thought there was nobody like him. He always came back to her with his troubles and she still felt pride in his immaculate appearance, his energy, and his unending optimism. Their twin daughters resembled their father; round-eyes, globular foreheads, sharp pink-tinted noses, giggling optimism … Only what in the sprightly Jubal Medlicott was attractive, in the two girls was plain, almost repulsive. There was a joke in the town that Mr. Medlicott had offered a complete wedding rig-out from his shop to whoever would take his daughters from his hands. Dorothy and Mary—Dolly and Polly—were their father’s darlings, the foils for his wit, the Mrs. ’Arrises of his anecdotes, and he treated them with a mock courtesy of bowing scraping and blowing kisses to which they responded in kind. Among her exuberant family, Mrs. Medlicott looked worn and faded, her pale invalid’s eyes followed them around full of fondness, her tired hands served them, and she went shabby herself to balance their budget.

  “… the bullet entered the skull from behind, travelled through the cerebellum and the corpus callosum, and made its exit through the frontal bone over the right eye.…”

  Dr. Halston was saying his piece and Mr. Green was slowly taking it down. A dull thud, and Bertha Bunn slid to the floor in a dead faint. She hadn’t understood the medical report, but it sounded terrible. There was a scrimmage as Wilfred Flounder, two ushers and a constable carried her out. The leaders of the Bunn family were unmoved. They were used to it. In fact, they resented the interruption. Mrs. Medlicott alone detached herself from the group and, with slow tired steps, followed Bertha’s retinue into the ante-room.

  The inquest was adjourned. The family looked a bit surprised, as though they’d expected a verdict similar to that of a murder trial. They hesitated momentarily in their seats, whispered among themselves, and then rose and made for the door in procession. Presumably, Jasper Bunn should have headed it, but he stayed behind to consult the Coroner’s officer; so his sister, Sr’Agnes, with her diminutive husband and even smaller son, led the way. She kept turning to see what was going on and muttering. There was an order of precedence in the Bunn family, strictly adhered to, like those rituals of jackdaws in which the higher one pecks the one immediately below it to keep it in place.

  Mrs. Jasper Bunn and her two sons hesitated, formed a minor procession of their own, and went out without their leader. Mrs. Jasper fished deeply in her large handbag, took out a slab of chocolate, bit it, like a tobacco-chewer taking a quid, and began to munch contentedly.

  Littlejohn gently tapped Jasper Bunn on the shoulder.

  “Could we have a word together, sir?”

  Jasper jumped, dropped his silk hat, rescued it, and started to restore the nap by rubbing it along his sleeve.

  “You gave me a shock, Inspector. Shouldn’t startle me like that. My heart’s none too good.”

  He ran his fingers down the buttons of his waistcoat to see they were all decent and in place.

  “We can’t talk here; they’re shutting up shop.”

  He was right. Mr. Surtees Green had vanished from his pulpit, the police and other officers had made an exit through a private door, and only Cromwell remained with Littlejohn, holding two hats and looking expectant.

  “I must confess the inquest was a bit of a farce. I’d quite a lot to tell Green, I can assure you.”

  “Suppose you tell me …”

  Jasper Bunn looked a bit nonplussed. He’d only been wanting to talk a lot of hot-air and now it all seemed irrelevant.

  “It hadn’t exactly to do with the murder. I wanted to give Green our alibis, but he wouldn’t let me speak. He’s only half-baked, you know. A brilliant lawyer gone completely to seed, Inspector. That’s what comes of getting married to a half-wit of a woman. Green knew there was a streak of insanity in the family. Now, she leads him a dog’s life. Up half the night nagging him and chasing round the house after burglars and such like.”

  Mr. Jasper was just having his ’few words’!

  “Let’s go and have a drink, sir, and I can talk better with you then.”

  Mr. Bunn raised this thick black eyebrows and his pug’s face grew set.

  “I’m teetotal. Very much opposed to strong drink. I don’t mind, however, a glass of port wine. I take it as a tonic.”

  Cromwell was attacked by a fit of coughing behind his hand and seemed busily occupied with the two hats he was carrying.

  They found Mr. Blowitt of The Freemasons’ in a livelier mood. He had, over breakfast, apologized to Cromwell for his behaviour of the previous day.

  “I get a bit out o’ sorts, sometimes. Temperamental, you know. In this place all day and every day gets on me nerves now an’ then. I used to be a musician in the Army and when things like this Bunn business crops up, it gets me down and makes me wish I never left …’ope you’ll think no more of it.”

  He thereupon shook hands with Cromwell, gave him an alibi for himself for the night Bunn had been killed, and ended up playing “Smoke gets in my eyes” on the piano, just to show his spirits had been restored.

  Mr. Blowitt seemed surprised to see Mr. Jasper Bunn. He even got a bit sarcastic.

  “Not offen you grace our ’umble pub, Mr. Bunn.”

  Mr. Bunn hung up his silk hat carefully on the hat-stand, dilated his pug’s nostrils at the smell of beer and spirits, and snorted.

  “You know my views, Blowitt.”

  Mr. Blowitt smiled as he served two beers and a dock glass of port. He winked at Cromwell. Mr. Bunn drank half his port, coughed, ran his tongue round his mouth and then finished the glass.

  “Same again, Mr. Blowitt.”

  Cromwell couldn’t resist it.

  “I’m thirsty after that inquest,” said Bunn, mopping his reddening face with a silk handkerchief. “What did you wish to know, Inspector?”

  “Just where you and the family were at the time your brother died, sir.”

  Mr. Bunn sipped his next glass like a hen drinking.

  “At ’ome, of course. We’re great ’omebirds.”

  “Your sons, too?”

  “Yes. We were having a meeting ab
out some repairs for the church. I am a deacon, sir, and my two sons are on the council. So, we said we might as well meet the parson. You won’t know him yet, Inspector. A Mister ’Ornblower … A very good preacher, I must say, but a bit weak doctrinally … Yes, a rather h’empty vessel on doctrine … Hic … Pardon me.”

  “Wasn’t your brother interested in such a meeting, sir?”

  “Who? Ned? Oh, yes. But this was an informal meetin’, if you understand what I mean. Confidentially … confidentially … my brother liked to run the whole place. Liked wot he said to be law. Tried to dominate the meetin’. So we had to arrange beforehand what we wanted and form a strong h’opposition to him at the formal meetin’s. See what I mean?”

  Littlejohn nodded.

  “Cut and dried beforehand?”

  Mr. Jasper Bunn beamed. Here was a man after his own heart! He drank his second glass of port.

  “Exactly. That’s the only way of dealin’ with dictators. A bit of secret democracy. Wot?”

  He chuckled.

  “For a teetotal drink, port wine’s the best of the lot.”

  He hiccupped again and begged pardon.

  “Anythin’ more, Inspector?”

  “Had your brother many enemies, sir?”

  Mr. Jasper brooded alcoholically.

  “No, sir. Not as might want to kill ’im. That is, not as far as I know. Unless it might be that Flounder fellow. A bounder, sir, he is. Flounder, the bounder … Not so bad, that? No … He’s only after my niece for her money and as Ned wouldn’t ’ave it, perhaps he did the murder to get his own way. Crime of passion, so to speak. Not that I would condemn a pore erring brother unheard. See what I mean? Fair’s fair.”

  His face assumed a sanctimonious expression.

  “There’s none of us should judge another,

  For fear our judgment’s wrong,

  Perhaps our own eye has a beam…

  I forget the rest. Once saw it in an autograph album; thought it good. Eh?”