Bleeding Hooks Read online

  “Yesterday? She was worse yesterday than ever, Mr. Winkley. How I kept my hands from her throat, I don’t know. She said she felt better than she had done all her life. Something had pleased her a good deal – perhaps it was the trout she had caught the day before – but she talked more than ever. She was full of pranks, too. She was skittish, and kept asking if I thought she had sex-appeal. She would not fish, but lay in the boat, and dabbled her hands in the water. And on a lake like this which is full of the best sea-trout in Wales!” he finished in disgust.

  “I wonder what she was so pleased about. Did she talk of anyone she knew?”

  “No, no,” replied the ghillie, “unless it was Will. She was often talking lately about him.”

  “And who is he?” asked Mr. Winkley.

  “I don’t know, sir. She talked all the time but I never listened. After a time, your ears just hear noise and an odd word or two, if you don’t want to listen.” He paused for a moment, then said, “You don’t suppose that anyone did away with her, sir, do you?”

  Mr. Winkley looked startled.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked. “Do you know of anyone who had threatened her?”

  John laughed.

  “Oh no, sir. But I can think of a good many men who wanted her out of the way. She was a menace to the fishing, sir. She made a laughing-stock of all of us, ghillies and visitors alike.”

  “I suppose you didn’t get rid of her yourself, did you?” asked Mr. Winkley.

  John shook his head almost regretfully.

  “No, sir. She paid me too well.”

  And Mr. Winkley, not for the first time, thought that the Royal Standard was incomplete without three money bags rampant to represent Wales.

  “Well, she won’t talk to you any more,” he said, as he got up and stretched his long legs. He took a cigarette from his case, offered one to John, and lit them both. “By the way, I lost something out of my pocket yesterday. I might have dropped it somewhere around here. A little bottle, not of any value, but I might as well have a look for it.”

  John grinned.

  “You’ll find plenty of bottles here, sir, under those bushes or behind the rocks, but they won’t be little ones. Nor milk bottles!”

  He gathered the luncheon debris together, packed it in the basket, and carried it down to the boat.

  Mr. Winkley walked about in drunken fashion, peering at the ground in places where it was improbable that anyone could have dropped anything by accident. He had not gone many yards before he was aware of a figure who, with head thrust forward, was apparently engaged in a similar search. He hurried forward.

  “Hello. Lost something?” he asked.

  General Sir Courtney Haddox straightened himself in some embarrassment, and Mr. Winkley saw that his hands trembled.

  “It’s a bad day for salmon,” he said vaguely. “Yes, I was looking for something I dropped here yesterday. It doesn’t really matter, but I thought I’d take a look round as I was here. It was a fly, a salmon fly.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Winkley in an expressionless voice. “What kind was it?”

  “A Bloody Butcher,” replied the General.

  Chapter 17

  The three self-appointed investigators met together after dinner to pool their information and discuss what progress they had made.

  Gunn was annoyed, and made no secret of it.

  “I believe you did it on purpose,” he said to Mr. Winkley. “All that talk about meeting for lunch was eyewash. All the time, you were laughing up your sleeve, knowing that you’d given instructions to David to keep me on the other side of the lake so that you could get on with some secret investigation of your own!”

  Mr. Winkley laughed.

  “I assure you I did nothing of the kind,” he said, “but I admit I ought to have foreseen that David would never bring you across the lake in a north wind. I had the devil’s own job to persuade John Jones to row me over there, and he never stopped grumbling. You see,” he continued, as Gunn remained adamantly unappeased, “when a ghillie is lent to anyone in that way, it puts him on his mettle to show what he can do. He tries to take you over as many fish as possible, and to bring in as many as he can. David knew that he would risk having a blank day if he brought you over to join me on my side of the lake this morning. You would have had a poor opinion of his ghillying in consequence, and would probably have forgotten to tip him, and these Welshmen have money-boxes instead of hearts.”

  “You brought in as many fish as we did,” growled Gunn, still unconvinced, “so the fishing can’t be so very different.”

  “That was just my good luck,” returned Mr. Winkley.

  Pussy laughed.

  “Mr. Winkley really means that it was his good fishing, but he’s far too polite to say so. Poor lamb!” she chaffed. “Were you made to fish against your will while Mr. Winkley had all the fun, then? Why didn’t you hit the ghillie over the head with an oar, or stick a few fly hooks into him?”

  “You really didn’t miss much,” said Mr. Winkley, and went painstakingly through the events of the morning.

  Gunn soon forgot his grievance as he listened.

  “But I don’t see why you were looking for a bottle,” he remarked at length, “unless it was a blind, and you were really expecting to find something else.”

  “Oh no,” replied Mr. Winkley. “I did expect to find a bottle.”

  “What kind of a bottle?” asked Pussy. “Perfume, beer, sauce, or baby’s?”

  “A killing bottle,” was the reply.

  “Come again, I’ll buy it,” retorted Pussy. “You’ll kill me, if you don’t explain things a bit better.”

  The two men ignored her, as usual.

  “You mean a cyanide bottle for killing butterflies and moths?” asked Gunn.

  “Yes,” replied Mr. Winkley, leaning forward and stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table in front of him. “You know how they’re made. Lumps of cyanide are placed at the bottom of the bottle and covered with plaster of Paris, so that the gas rises through the porous plaster, and forms a little lethal chamber. A lot of fishermen use them for collecting specimens of flies which they find on the lake or river, so that they can match the ones which the fish eat, with artificial flies.”

  “But no one would carry a killing bottle about with them so late in the season as this,” objected Gunn.

  “I think they would,” returned Mr. Winkley, “if the specimen they required was a human one.”

  Pussy threw back her head and yowled at the ceiling. Gunn looked at her, and laughed.

  “Do you mind explaining?” he asked. “Pussy can’t understand words of more than one syllable, as you know, and I’m not quite sure that I see what you’re driving at myself. Are you suggesting that Mrs. Mumsby was poisoned?”

  Mr. Winkley nodded.

  “But you said that the bleeding hooks killed her,” protested Pussy, relishing the adjective.

  “So they did, but only because they were poisoned. I’ve suspected it ever since I saw the body: the way it was twisted, for one thing, and of course, the cyanosis of the face. You’re a medical student. You’d have spotted it immediately if you’d seen her.”

  Gunn accepted the implied compliment without any demur.

  “Of course,” he said excitedly. “Someone used the word cyanosed to describe the purple flush on her face after she was dead. I remember now, but at the time it conveyed nothing sinister to me.”

  “That’s interesting,” remarked Mr. Winkley. “It’s not a word that the average person uses much. Do you remember who said it?”

  Gunn frowned in his effort at concentration.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. “They were all in the lounge at the time, and it might have been anybody. I’ve a vague idea that it was your mother,” he added, turning to Pussy.

  “Don’t talk rot,” replied Pussy sharply. “She wasn’t there when Mrs. Mumsby died.”

  “No, of course not,” agreed Gunn. “The
n I’m afraid I don’t remember.” He paused for a moment, and then said,

  “You think then, sir, that someone had previously decided to kill Mrs. Mumsby, and came prepared with the salmon fly, dipped it in cyanide from the killing bottle, and pulled it into her hand, so that the poison was injected into the Wood stream?”

  “I always said that the shock of the hook in her hand wouldn’t be enough to kill her,” triumphed Pussy. “But, of course, if it was poisoned, that’s a different story altogether.”

  “Yes. You see the idea that anyone forced that hook into her hand, knowing that she had a weak heart and might die from the shock of the pain, seemed very far-fetched to me,” explained Mr. Winkley. “The method was too unreliable.”

  “I quite agree,” said Pussy. “Anyone who wanted to kill her in that kind of way would think of something much more startling than a fly-hook – something really terrifying, I mean. I’ve often thought that that horrid old monkey of Claude’s might be too much for some people. The way it hurls itself through the air and lands on your neck is enough to –” She stopped speaking, and put a hand up to her mouth as if to hold the words back. A look of apprehension crept into her bold, green eyes. “But I’m sure it was the poison,” she concluded lamely.

  The others appeared not to have heard her.

  “That’s all very neatly constructed, Mr. Winkley,” said Gunn, “but how much cyanide would it take to kill anyone in that way, and could the small hook hold the fatal dose? I rather doubt that it could. I suppose you’ve got all that worked out?”

  Mr. Winkley lit a cigarette, exhaled the smoke through his nostrils like a benevolent dragon, then offered his case apologetically to the other two. Pussy refused with a shake of her head – she never smoked anything but Russian cigarettes – and wondered whether Mr. Winkley always remembered to use his battered silver case because he bought his cigarettes in fifties or hundreds so that he could use the empty tins for fishing tackle.

  “It wasn’t cyanide.” replied Mr. Winkley. “I’ve been examining the fly from Mrs. Mumsby’s hand, and, as far as I can see, there’s no trace of any substance on it except dried blood. Cyanide would have left a little crystallization. No, a liquid poison was used.”

  “Prussic acid!” exclaimed Pussy. “I once read a book where some old professor-josser killed himself by dipping his cut finger in prussic acid.”

  “Hark at her!” jeered Gunn. “She once read a book. Ye Gods and little fishes! Who would have thought it possible? Prussic acid, my angel, is a gas, and if you can tell me how to fix some gas on to the end of a salmon hook, you’re the world’s marvel, and when you peg out, they ought to stuff your body and present it to the British Museum!”

  “But it distinctly said that he dipped his finger into a glass of prussic acid,” protested Pussy.

  Gunn sighed.

  “I wish they’d teach elementary chemistry in these exclusive girls’ schools,” he said. “I remember lending that book to you, and the old josser, as you call him, was a chemist and mixed potassium cyanide with hydrochloric or some strong acid which liberated prussic acid gas in the liquid.”

  “I’ve no doubt that you’re right,” said Mr. Winkley, “but don’t you think you’re quibbling a bit? After all, although it must have been used in some liquid form, it was the prussic acid which poisoned her. The trouble is that it is so unlikely that anyone has ever been killed before by having a poisoned fish-hook in her hand, and that, short of trying it out on someone, I don’t see how we can prove that it did actually happen.”

  “We could try it on a poor little guinea-pig,” suggested Pussy.

  “Don’t be so ‘Citadel’,” retorted Gunn. “And anyway it wouldn’t help. We couldn’t be sure that the same amount which killed the guinea-pig would be fatal to a human being.”

  “One person knows the amount,” put in Mr. Winkley, “and that’s the murderer. It’s a dangerous piece of knowledge to possess, and it’s well known that one murder leads to another.”

  Gunn nodded his head.

  “A nasty thought,” he said. “By the way, I take it that the killing bottle you’re talking about wouldn’t be the usual kind, except perhaps in shape, otherwise the plaster of Paris would absorb the liquid, and leave you with the gas to suspend on the hook.”

  Mr. Winkley nodded.

  “That’s so,” he said. “I doubt whether you could chip the plaster out of that kind of bottle, either. I just call it a killing bottle because it kills, and I imagine the murderer would have procured a bottle of that shape because it would excite less comment if he kept it, as I imagine he did, among his fishing tackle.”

  “By Jove!” exclaimed Gunn, clasping his hands behind his head as if to ease his brain from so much concentrated thinking. “The whole thing’s damned clever. If you hadn’t spotted that salmon fly and thought it queer, no one would have suspected that she died of anything but heart failure. Dr. Rippington Roberts has already signed the death certificate.”

  “Well, it ought to be easy enough to find the murderer,” remarked Pussy. “All you have to do is to find someone who is good at chemistry, like that Professor.”

  Gunn ran exasperated fingers through his hair.

  “Pussy, my pet, as a sleuth you’re the eighth wonder of the world.”

  Pussy took a deep breath.

  “The Pyramids of Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Tomb of Mausoleus, the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus by Phidias, the Palace of Cyprus (the stones of which are cemented with gold), the Colossus of Rhodes,” she said without a pause.

  The two men gaped at her in silence.

  “All right, I’m not crazy,” she said, laughing. “I once took a course of shorthand and typing, and if you’d hammered that out as many times as I did, you’d know it off by heart, too.”

  “Well, as I was saying,” continued Gunn, “the murderer doesn’t need to be a chemist. Why, any schoolboy knows the preparation of prussic acid: he uses the constituents for... for...” He faltered, and Pussy cocked an eye at him, like a curious bird. “Well, for lots of things,” he concluded lamely. “I suppose you suspected poison when you yelled out to me in the dark, not to touch your hand,” he said to Mr. Winkley.

  “Yes. I didn’t know then what poison had been used, and thought that the hook might still have been impregnated with it. And, incidentally, although you’re right in saying that the murderer need not be a chemist or a professor, I think that he must be familiar with the use of chemicals and able to obtain them without difficulty, although, in these days of highly skilled amateur photographers, perhaps that isn’t worth considering. Anyway, I’ve scraped the deposit off the hook for analysis, and have given the fly a general clean-up so that you can now see what it looks like. We shall have to find out what kind it is, and where it was made. It’s not a familiar pattern to me, but then I don’t know much about salmon flies, as I usually fish for trout. It’s the only clue we have, and we must make the best of it.”

  “I don’t see how you can possibly find out where it was made,” remarked Pussy. “It won’t have a label sewn inside it, saying ‘Taquin’ or ’Norman Hartnell’.”

  “No, we can’t hope for a label.” smiled Mr. Winkley. “Do you ever make your own clothes, Miss Partridge?”

  “Occasionally,” replied Pussy, bridling a little at a question which verged on the personal. She frequently made more personal remarks to other people, but felt doubly embarrassed when the compliment was returned.

  “Could you pick out, say, a blouse which you had made, from half a dozen made by other people?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “And how would you recognize it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. By the general look of it, I suppose. The stitching, and the finish of the seams, and that sort of thing.”

  “Exactly,” replied Mr. Winkley. “And that’s how you can recognize the make of a fly. Every tying has a characteristic look about it. Amateurs usually tie the silk or twist the
hackle in a different way from professionals. On the other hand, it would be impossible to mistake a ‘Dayson’ for a ’Hardy’ even though both are professionally tied, and it’s usually quite easy to spot some difference between the fly-tying of different amateurs, although you may need a magnifying glass to do it. I expect that Major Jeans has one marked characteristic, and General Haddox another.”

  “I’ll go and fetch the fly Major Jeans made for me today,” said Pussy.

  She swung out of her chair and dropped a kiss lightly on Gunn’s hair as she passed.

  Mr. Winkley took an envelope out of his pocket and shook the much-discussed salmon fly on to the palm of his hand. Then he placed it on the table with the white envelope as background, and the two men looked at it with careful eyes. Mr. Winkley had cleaned the blood from the feathers, and the fly glinted up at them. It had the thin, threadbare appearance of a favourite fly which has caught many fish, but otherwise it appeared in all its brave colours, and Gunn marvelled again that such an innocent-looking object could have become the implement of a murderer.

  Pussy, swinging her slim legs in their black velvet evening trousers, came down the stairs in dance rhythm, and chasséed across the intervening parquet blocks of the hall. She put her arm around Gunn’s broad shoulder, and gazed down at the white envelope. Then, with a swift movement of her hand, she placed the Major’s fly beside the one which had killed Mrs. Mumsby.

  “Snap!” she cried.

  The two men gasped as they stared downwards.

  As far as could be seen with the naked eye, the two flies were identical!

  Chapter 18

  “Well,” said Mr. Winkley finally, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes, “I can’t see any difference between them. They both look the same size, same colour, same tying, same everything. There might be some slight difference in detail, but they’re both amateur-tied; neither of them has the slim finish of a professional fly. I’ll have them properly examined, of course, but the trouble is that it won’t help much. Even if they should both happen to be Major Jeans’ flies, it doesn’t mean that he is responsible for her murder. He might have given one away, or someone might have taken it from his collection. You were in his room, Miss Partridge; were the flies kept locked up?”