Corpses in Enderby (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery) Read online

  Mr. Jasper Bunn wasn’t too drunk to stall. Littlejohn could see it in his fishy, protruding eyes. There was something he wasn’t going to talk about. Perhaps it was old Jerry Bunn’s will. At any rate, it would all come out after the funeral. Jasper was on his feet putting on his hat a little rakishly.

  “I don’t feel very well.… My heart.… Must be the emotion of the death and inquest.”

  He tottered unsteadily.

  “Better go ’ome in a cab.”

  And that ended the inquest and the first formal rally of the Bunn clan; the players in the drama Littlejohn was to watch for some days to come and which, according to some, was to terminate in his worst failure.

  6

  THE SUPERANNUATED PARSON

  MR. BLOWITT, the landlord of The Freemasons’, stood in his shirt-sleeves at the door of his public-house, watching the passers-by. The eternal cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth and he seemed in a melancholy way to be enjoying it more than usual. He had just had another dramatic quarrel with his wife, who, this time, had accused him of making overtures to the girl who brought the milk. He sighed and went indoors to join Littlejohn and Cromwell, who were awaiting lunch.

  “They say smoking shortens your life,” he said, removing his cigarette and coughing loudly, after making sure that his wife was within earshot at the bar. “All I says is, the sooner the better with me.” He lit another cigarette from the stub of the last. His wife thereupon made a gulping noise, bit her handkerchief, and made her famous East Lynne exit.

  Mr. Blowitt immediately became more cheerful.

  “Everybody seems to be gatherin’ for the funeral. Bunns arrivin’ from all over the shop.” He took the policemen to the window and showed them the latest newcomers from the bus. A fat woman with a florid complexion and dressed in black from top to toe was ponderously entering Bunn’s shop, followed by a thin, tottering, blue-nosed old man, also fully clad in mourning and wearing a billycock hat with a broad black band.

  “That’s old Gilbert Slinger and his missus. She was a sister of Jeremiah Bunn and they’re both over eighty if a day. Rollin’ in money, though you wouldn’t think so to look at ’em. They used to run the eyelet-’ole works as Jasper Bunn and his sons now has.”

  It had been going on all day. Numerous as the tribes of Israel, the Bunns had been foregathering for the funeral on the morrow and were sorting themselves out and inflicting themselves for the night on various local relatives. It had been a busy morning, too, for tailors, dressmakers, hosiers, hatters and outfitters as their stocks of black were raided, and the undertakers and the parson had been commissioned exactly concerning the parts they were to play.

  “I thought of goin’ to the funeral myself,” said Mr. Blowitt cheerfully. “But if I did, the wife would suspect me of kissin’ the gravedigger’s daughter, so I’d better stop away.”

  After lunch, Littlejohn made his way to the Manse of the Salem Chapel to confirm the alibis of Jasper Bunn and his family. The house, like the church, was the worse for wear. A stone wall which had shed all its mortar, surrounded the dirty brick building. An iron gate with a smashed catch, and held in place by a piece of rusty wire, hung at the end of a mossy stone path, which led through a neglected garden. Old trees and lank bushes made an avenue to the front door which badly needed a coat of paint. Littlejohn had to hammer on the panels because the bell was broken. As he mounted the steps, the middle one tilted dangerously.

  A little, grey-haired smiling woman opened the door. She looked tired and determined to be cheerful whatever happened. She read the Inspector’s card, shook hands, and asked him to enter. The hand she gave him was hard from work. Her clothes were shabby but carefully brushed and mended.

  The Manse was large and frugally furnished. The hall was covered in linoleum, without carpets, and their footsteps sounded hollow as they crossed it. A wide staircase rose from the left and there was a big window glazed in ruby glass on the landing. The place seemed empty and barren and the air smelled of vast, neglected, dusty rooms. All the doors downstairs were closed. Mrs. Hornblower tapped at the first on the left and ushered Littlejohn in. It was the minister’s study, stuffy and overcrowded, overlooking the wild garden. There was a collapsible dining-table in one corner with two dining-chairs. It looked as though the parson and his wife made this their sole living-room when she was not working in the kitchen.

  Mr. Jasper had said, in his tipsy confidences, that Mr. Hornblower was doctrinally weak. The man who greeted him did not look a weakling. He had a pale, craggy, clean-shaven face, thick white hair swept back from a broad forehead, a large nose, firm chin and a wide, loose, sarcastic mouth. He was tall and heavily built, spotlessly clean in his shabby clerical clothes and linen, and the hand he offered Littlejohn was well-kept. He must have been between sixty and seventy.

  “I hardly expected a call from you, Inspector …”

  Mrs. Hornblower closed them in and you could hear her steps echoing down the hall. The two men sat before the fire in the old-fashioned grate in two saddlebacked chairs upholstered in horsehair. There was an old skin rug before the hearth and the paint and wallpaper of the room were shabby and needed renewal. Over the fireplace, a portrait of the Rev. Hornblower as a young man, clad in cap and gown and holding a diploma prominently in his clenched fist.

  The alibis of Jasper Bunn and his brood were in order. Mr. and Mrs. Hornblower had attended the informal meeting at their home on the night Ned Bunn was killed and they had stayed to supper and left about eleven.

  “I suppose you know a lot about the Bunn family, sir.”

  Mr. Hornblower passed his hand over his hair, looked in the fire, and regarded Littlejohn with grey eyes which seemed to grow paler whenever he grew excited.

  “More than I could put down in several books, Inspector. I’ve known them for almost forty years … intimately …”

  “Forty years! You haven’t been at Salem Church all that time!”

  “No. Twenty years altogether, in two separate spells. I was there as a young man for fifteen years. Then I left to take a living elsewhere. I worked in various fields until I was superannuated. Then, five years ago, I received another invitation to Salem. They couldn’t afford to pay a full-time pastor, and asked if I would do part-time there, with my pension to make up the rest. I agreed … though it doesn’t seem part-time to me. I seem to work as hard … harder, in fact, than I did as a young man. Perhaps it’s age makes the work seem heavier.”

  “Could you tell me something about the Bunn family? I don’t want any breaches of confidence, sir, but you could help, you know.”

  Mr. Hornblower started to fill an old briar pipe and Littlejohn followed suit.

  “They are obsessed by money … All of them, without exception. Even Anne, who married Medlicott. She, of course, has to be miserly to keep the wolf from the door. Medlicott has made away with all the money they ever had. Yet, she is devoted to him.”

  “Is the family a large one?”

  “Very … and very close-knit. Jeremiah Bunn, the father of the Enderby line, had four brothers who, in turn, had branches of their own. There will be a huge gathering at Edwin Bunn’s funeral, although, as you perhaps know, Edwin wasn’t really a Bunn at all. He was adopted by arrangement between his mother and his foster-father. That caused resentment among the rest of Jerry Bunn’s family, a feeling which has grown with the years.”

  The Manse must, at one time, have stood in fields on the verge of the town, but opposite had been built rows of terraced houses. Men in their shirt-sleeves stood talking at the doors, children played in the street, and in the dilapidated gardens of the cottages, women were hanging out washing to dry. An angry mother was beating a child, her hair tumbling about her livid face, her arms rising and falling as the boy yelled and squirmed.

  “I believe his brother and sisters will come into quite a tidy fortune apiece now that Edwin Bunn has died. His share of his foster-father’s fortune was in trust for them, with Ned taking the income till h
is death. Now they’ll inherit over ten thousand apiece …”

  “And Bertha will get what her father leaves in his own right?”

  “Exactly. How do you know?”

  “Between you and me, Mr. Edgell, the lawyer, told me.”

  “Edgell … Ha! A great friend of the family. He was engaged to Anne Bunn until Medlicott came along and carried her off. Quite a local scandal. Edgell never married. Some people say it turned his brain a bit. You see, they’d bought the house, and all that. I’m not so sure that Medlicott was the better choice. He’s run through all Anne’s money, begotten two daughters as silly and irresponsible as himself, and generally made Anne’s life a catastrophe. Yet, she loves him. Beautiful, tragic irony of life!”

  Littlejohn looked at the fine face, the sarcastic lips of the man sitting beside him. Perhaps Jasper Bunn was right, after all. He glanced at the titles of the books nearest to him and which covered three walls of the room. Dusty volumes of sermons by dead-and-gone divines, theology, psychology, essays and memoirs; but bright and to hand, shabby and well-thumbed, Anatole France, Marcel Proust, Aldous Huxley, Sartre, Donne, Berdyaev and Kierkegaard … All from a world far beyond Enderby and the Bunns. Very doctrinally different from Jasper and his vast flock of relatives! There were galley-proofs of a manuscript on the desk under the window. Littlejohn wondered what Hornblower was working on and what the pillars of Salem would think of it. Actually, the book was, twelve months later, to lose Salem for Mr. Hornblower and earn him a scholastic reputation.

  “I haven’t learned much about the elder sister; Agnes, is she called?”

  “Sarah Agnes, yes. The most formidable of the lot. Married to a very decent fellow, too, of distinct promise as an architect in his young days, but gradually since his marriage, all the sap of life and art has been squeezed from him.”

  He looked in the fire and twisted his fingers, puffing away at the pipe which hung on his chest.

  “Her son, Barnabas … Barny, as his friends called him, rebelled and made a mess of his life. His mother manacled and secluded him so much by her domineering ways, that he fell frantically in love with the first good-looking woman he met … a married woman wedded to a brute of a husband. The situation was almost theatrical, but they ran off together …”

  “And haven’t been heard of since …?”

  Littlejohn gave the minister a searching look. Here was a man to whom people would come in, or after, trouble.

  “They went abroad …”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, sir. Have you seen or heard of them since?”

  Mr. Hornblower removed his pipe.

  “What are you getting at, Inspector?”

  “Were you a friend, a confidant, of Barny Bunn? Do you know exactly where he and his woman went?”

  “They went abroad. He wrote to me, once. He was fond of his father and wanted news about him from time to time … The woman he ran away with died of fever.”

  “Where is he now, sir?”

  “In London. The family don’t know, and I promised they shouldn’t. So you must swear to keep …”

  “I can’t swear anything, sir, but I’ll use the utmost discretion. Have you his address in London?”

  “No. He will write if he wants anything. I reply care of the Post Office he gives.”

  “If you hear from him, you must let me know.”

  “I will, if you will promise to take no steps without talking it over with me.”

  “Very well. That’s agreed, sir. What of the other members of Sarah Agnes’s family?”

  “A son, Henry … In his father’s business, but a bit of a wastrel. And Helen, a daughter … most beautiful … a bright bird among a lot of sparrows, and her mother will make a sparrow of her as well if she has her way.”

  “Why?”

  “Possessiveness. That woman dominates all she comes in contact with. She has interfered in two of the girl’s love-affairs already. There was an American doctor at the camp here during the war. Helen was in her ’teens. They were a suitable, happy couple. But America was too far away for Sarah Agnes … Her long arm couldn’t stretch so far. When it was all over, John Fearns told me of intercepted letters, fierce quarrels, constant nagging … The young doctor went away and was killed on ‘D’ day.”

  “And the other cases?”

  “A penniless reporter who came for a spell on our local paper. He attended Salem for a time. A very decent lad. He and Helen got very friendly … Then he packed up and left after an interview with Sarah Agnes. One day, Helen is going to follow Barny’s example, take matters in her own hands, and perhaps wreck her life, too.”

  “What a crew!”

  Littlejohn said it half under his breath, but the parson heard it.

  “You’re right, Inspector. The family held all its members in its grip … except, funnily enough, Jasper. They didn’t approve of his wedding to the flighty Louisa Freer, but the loving couple forced the issue … Louisa was going to have a child, so the family had to stand aside. That’s how it always happens in the Bunn family. They corner their members and impose their wills on them. Then, every so often, the victim strikes back. Jasper and Louisa … Anne and Medlicott … Barnabas and Mrs. Lemont … It even went as far back as old Jerry Bunn when he married Mary Wood. Mary had an illegitimate child and the family said ‘No’. Jerry eloped and adopted Mary’s child.”

  “And now … Now with Ned Bunn, sir?”

  The parson looked up keenly and then fearfully.

  “Now …? You mean, Inspector …?”

  “Someone has killed Ned Bunn. Which one had he cornered, tried to impose his will on, thwarted …?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The room was very still. Somewhere in the house, they could hear Mrs. Hornblower rattling tea-things. In the street, a knife-grinder was busy at his wheel with a crowd of children watching and taking it all in.

  “Yes, sir. History repeats itself. Sarah Agnes Bunn, or Fearns, drives her son frantic with repression …”

  “She kept him in knee-breeches till he was seventeen and gave him threepence a week to spend. He took her jewellery and three hundred pounds of her money with him when he ran away. He returned the jewellery when he got a job.”

  “Ned Bunn drove his daughter the same way. That is so, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. As a youngster, she was quite attractive. Like her mother, then. Ned Bunn, like the dominant animal in a herd, chased off all the young men who came after his girl. Then, finally …”

  “Yes?”

  “Her mother died. She was very fond of her mother and she was afraid to incur her father’s displeasure which he’d vent on his wife if Bertha left home. After her mother died, it didn’t matter.”

  “And Flounder came along and Bunn started his old tricks …”

  The parson sat up with a jerk.

  “My dear Inspector, you’re not trying to deduce that Bertha Bunn killed her own father because of his objection to Wilfred Flounder! She could very well have eloped as her grandfather did.”

  “But without her father’s fortune, she and Wilfred were penniless?”

  “Not quite. Her mother left her a little …”

  “But not a fortune …”

  Mrs. Hornblower entered with tea. She had brought out her silver service and best cups. The cloth on the tray was of fine linen with a little darn in the centre, so neatly done as to be almost invisible.

  “We’re just going through the tribe of Bunn and their many shortcomings, Alice.”

  Mrs. Hornblower laid down the tray carefully and began to pour out the tea.

  “We … I mean … the Bunns have made our life here rather difficult … But my husband always says we can’t have life made to our own specifications. We must take it as it is and have courage.”

  She bent her grey head over the cream jug in a kind of pathetic resignation which spoke of tragedy and filled Littlejohn with pity for something he couldn’t define.

  “You needn’
t have bothered about tea for me, Mrs. Hornblower. It’s very kind of you.”

  “Pour him out a cup, mother. He’ll be ready for it after all this talking.”

  The parson put down his pipe and rose to help his wife, touching her gently as he passed with a sort of comforting gesture.

  Hornblower had called her “mother”, and Littlejohn took it up almost instinctively.

  “Your children are grown-up and gone from home, then?”

  There was an eloquent pause and Littlejohn wished he hadn’t spoken.

  Mrs. Hornblower laid down a cup and took from the table on which the tray was laid, a photograph in a frame. It was of a young man in his early twenties, dressed in uniform, with the delicate well-moulded features of his mother and his father’s eyes and brow.

  “That was our only child … our boy. He was a war correspondent and was killed in Korea.”

  As Littlejohn held the picture, Mrs. Hornblower went on with her tale, like a little lament.

  “I didn’t want him to go. But he was so restless and … there was some trouble with a girl. He used to be a reporter on the local paper and they said he had a great career in store. He was to have gone to London … Fleet Street. But he got unsettled … I must get some cake …”

  She fled hurriedly from the room.

  Littlejohn’s eyes met those of the minister and took in the tired, lined features and the ironic twist of the generous mouth.

  “Helen Fearns?”

  Hornblower hung his head. Littlejohn could scarcely hear the reply.

  “Yes.”

  What was it Hornblower had said earlier?

  Beautiful, tragic irony of life!

  7

  THE ARRIVAL OF AUNT SARAH

  CROMWELL ruled a line under the report he had written in his black notebook, closed it with a snap, and slid it into his large inside pocket. His long face wore a look of distaste and he kept sniffing disgustedly. He had just washed his hands with the pink soap provided for the purpose by the Blowitts. It was scented.

  “Smells like a …”

  He sought in his mind for a suitable simile, found one which wasn’t quite decent, and let it go.