There's Trouble Brewing

  ‘Sorn!’ exclaimed Nigel and the inspector simultaneously.

  ‘Just so,’ munched Mr Grimshaw, leaning back in his chair and gazing at his visitors with undisguised consternation.

  ‘I considered the provision made for Mrs Bunnett to be most inadequate—I speak,’ he added hastily, ‘in my private, not my professional capacity. But my client did not take my remonstrations in good part. By no means.’

  ‘Who is this Mrs Sorn? Does she live here? A relation of Gabriel Sorn?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘Um-yum. She is domeeciled in the South of France. I have her address here.’ Mr Grimshaw passed a slip of paper to the inspector. ‘My client averred that she was an old friend of his. It was to do her a kindness, I understand, that he took her son into the brewery.’

  ‘Oh, so Mr Sorn is her son, is he?’ said the inspector with visible relish. ‘Well. We shall see. Now, sir, can you give me any idea how much this Mrs Sorn stands to gain by the will?’

  ‘Let me see, now. It is impossible for me to tell you precisely, of course. But I should say that, when all the other bequests have been settled, death duties paid, and so on, Mrs Sorn should receive something in the neighbourhood of £50,000.’

  ‘A tidy packet,’ said Nigel. ‘And what about Joe?’

  ‘My late client held a controlling interest in the brewery. That interest now passes to Joseph Bunnett.’

  ‘And what has Joseph’s position been so far?’

  ‘Nyum-nyah, I believe that he was paid a salary as manager of the transport and the tied houses. He also had shares in the business.’

  The inspector took the names of the lesser legatees—the head brewer’s was amongst them—thanked Mr Grimshaw and made to depart. The solicitor munched a polite farewell. As they reached the door, Nigel turned and said:

  ‘By the way, have you any idea why Eustace put in that proviso about his brother not being married?’

  ‘Professionally speaking, no, my dear sir. But, if I may say so as a private indeevidual and without prejudeece—without prejudeece, of course—I should say that it was due to my late client’s somewhat domineering tendencies. Please note, I am making no assertions. But when Mr Joe returned from the war, an attachment sprang up between him and a certain young lady in this locality who must be nameless. It was shortly after this that my client inserted that proviso in his will. Hum-munch. I make no assertions, I repeat. But you may think it legeeteemate to draw a certain inference.’

  ‘And how did Miss Mellors take all this?’ asked Nigel guilelessly. Mr Grimshaw’s ears performed an almost complete revolution.

  ‘Hum-mum-chumble-yum,’ he exclaimed uncomfortably. ‘Really, my dear sir, I fear we are going outside our terms of reference. I really cannot admit——’

  ‘Very well. We’ll have it stricken from the records. Many thanks. Good-day.’

  ‘What’s all this about Miss Mellors?’ said the inspector when they were outside.

  ‘In love with Joe Bunnett. Or was. Gave me two hints of it this morning. Nearly passed out when I told her Bunnett was dead—thought I meant Joe. Also said that Joe wouldn’t be carrying on the brewery business if she had any say in it: which means, presumably, she would have a say.’

  The inspector’s round and pasty face took on an unpleasing expression. It was, thought Nigel, like seeing a saucer of milk go sour before your eyes.

  ‘Meaning, sir, that Joe Bunnett had been prevented by his brother from marrying Miss Mellors. So Miss Mellors and Joe conspire to murder Eustace, thus removing the obstacle to their marriage and gaining for Joe the controlling interest in the brewery.’

  ‘And they always say the police have no imagination! No, I don’t mean all that. If Miss Mellors and Joe were in a conspiracy to murder Eustace, why should she come over all queer when I tell her that Bunnett’s dead?’

  ‘Ah, it takes them different ways. Don’t you be so sure, Mr Strangeways. I shall have to go into this.’

  ‘Joe’s on the high seas, anyway. Or isn’t he?’

  ‘I’ve not contacted him yet, sir’ (Nigel shuddered inwardly at the word), ‘but I’m expecting a report from the Poolhampton people any time now. Tollworthy is going round inquiring as to the whereabouts of everyone connected with Mr Bunnett on the night of the murder. May not be much use. People would normally be in bed by that time of night, and that’s about the most difficult alibi there is to break.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nigel to himself, remembering Herbert Cammison, ‘and about the most difficult alibi to prove, also.’

  They were walking along a narrow street of mean houses away from the centre of the town, a street that every fifty yards or so gave itself a shake and set off again in a different direction. The street was dreadfully hot, and afforded disagreeable evidence of terminating in a cattle-market. Nigel thought longingly of his own flat that looked out upon a démodé but clean and beautiful London square. Just as the stench grew almost intolerable and an open piece of ground covered with whitewashed pens appeared, the inspector stopped at a squalid red-brick house.

  ‘What have we come here for?’ Nigel asked. ‘I really don’t want to buy any fat stock at the moment.’

  ‘Maybe you’d fancy a pig in a poke,’ said Tyler with the challenging complacent air of one who has made a joke rather too subtle for the inferior wits of his audience.

  ‘I’ll buy it then. What is it?’

  ‘This is Mrs Bolster’s house,’ said the inspector, banging again on the door, ‘where Mr Sorn lodges.’

  ‘Here? Gabriel Sorn? God help us! But why? I didn’t know he was a coprophil as well as a surrealist.’

  The door opened and a woman, who answered very aptly to her name, appeared.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Bolster. Is your lodger in? I’d like a word with him.’

  ‘Mr Zorn’s out just now. He always goes for a walk on Zaturday aafternune. He’ll be back to tea any minute now, though.’

  ‘We’ll wait for him, then. May we step inside?’

  ‘Surely. This way, gentlemen, if you please.’

  Mrs Bolster let them pass and closed the door behind them. The passage was almost pitch-dark and impregnated with a complex and peculiarly noisome odour, of which one could predicate nothing but that its basis seemed to be rotten fish.

  ‘Will you wait in the parlour?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I think we might as well go straight to Mr Sorn’s room. One thing, Mrs Bolster. I’m investigating the murder of Mr Bunnett, and we have to find out—just as a matter of routine—the whereabouts of everyone connected with him on Thursday night. Mr Sorn was at a party till 11.15 or so. I suppose he got back about half-past?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Haaf-paast to the tick, it was. Our Bertha had the toothache fair cruel that night and I was zitting up with her. Very poorlee she was.’

  ‘I suppose you locked up after him, then?’ said the inspector, looking a trifle dashed.

  ‘Oh, no, sir, he always locks up himself. He often goes for walks at night, you see, sir. Many’s the time I’ve toold him the night air’s no good for man or beast, but he will do it. A queer gentleman in his habits, but he pays up his rent regular.’

  ‘Did he go for one of his walks on Thursday night?’

  ‘That I cannot tell you, not for sure. I thought I did hear him go downstairs again, me being awake with our Bertha, who was poorlee that night. Walking very quietlee he was, as he always does at night, not being wishful to wake us up. A very conziderate gentleman, Mr Zorn, I will say that.’

  ‘I’m sure he is,’ said the inspector heartily. ‘You didn’t actually hear him go out, then?’

  ‘No, sir, I caan’t say as I did. Oh, dearie me! I was forgetting. I must be fair mazed. Why, it was only laast night, when I brought in his supper, Mr Zorn says to me, “Bolster,” he says, that being his way of calling me, and I always said it was disrespectful, but you can’t pick and choose with your lodgers nowadays, “Bolster,” he says, “I hope I didn’t wake you up last night when I came in.” I told him I
was awake with our Bertha along of her being poorlee with the toothache. So Mr Zorn he says he hadn’t felt too happee in his inzides that night so he’d gone downstairs to fetch a book in case he couldn’t go to zleep. So I must have heard him, see, when he was fetching the book.’

  ‘Yes. That was it, no doubt,’ purred the inspector. ‘Well, now, if you will show us Mr Sorn’s room, I don’t think I need trouble you any more.’

  The most noticeable thing in Gabriel Sorn’s room was an extraordinary, confused, scurrying, metallic noise—as though one had walked into a kind of mechanical ant-heap. That, indeed, was the only noticeable thing, for the room was even darker than the passage outside.

  ‘An infernal machine, that’s what it must be,’ thought Nigel fatalistically. ‘Sorn has left it here to blow up the incriminating evidence and the detectives. Neat, if unfortunate.’

  Mrs Bolster drew back the curtains, saying:

  ‘Mr Zorn must’ve been writing at his poetree before he went out. Always makes it up easiest in the dark, he says.’

  ‘Like developing a photograph? Quite a sound principle,’ said Nigel, his eyes tight shut against the imminent explosion and the painful dazzle of the sunlight that was now pouring in.

  ‘Ah, quite a lot of things can get done in the dark, eh, Mr Strangeways?’ said the inspector with ponderous significance.

  ‘Please, Inspector! We are not in the smoking-room now,’ protested Nigel, slowly opening his eyes. ‘Wouldn’t it be a good plan to put the bomb into a bucket of water—before it blows us all up, I mean.’

  ‘Bomb!’ exploded the inspector. ‘Bomb! What’s all this about a bomb? You got a touch of the sun, sir?’

  ‘Oh, I beg your pardon. The error, I perceive, was mine. So Sorn is a chronometrophil as well as a coprophil. I wonder how many there are.’

  Nigel began to walk around the room, counting the clocks in it. ‘Reading from left to right,’ he said, ‘we have a grandfather clock; a cuckoo clock; two timepieces of Swiss origin, very rare and curious, depicting respectively a gnome hammering an anvil and a coach with its rear wheel revolving in jerks; on the mantelpiece a marble clock, weighing probably a ton, surmounted by a pair of all-in wrestlers who are clearly not trying very hard; also two travelling clocks; a wall clock, done in fretwork, with most of its entrails dangling out; a more modest clock, coyly peeping out of red plush; a ditto, ditto, green plush; eleventh and lastly, a combined clock, calendar and barometer—no doubt it tells fortunes as well and gives nightly talks on the cultivation of mangel-wurzels. Well I never did. And do all these clocks belong to Mr Sorn?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir,’ said Mrs Bolster. ‘They’re faather’s.’

  ‘A collector, is he?’

  ‘No, sir. Faather’s religious, you see. He had a vision that the Zecond Coming was to be at midnight on April 3rd laast year; and wanting to be punctual and readee like, you see, he used to go round they auctions buying up clocks. He set them all up in yurr, so that if one or two went out of order suddenlee, he’d still know when to have his loins girded up notwithstanding. Then, when the Zecond Coming didn’t happen, he hadn’t the heart to get rid of them. It’d got to be a habit, you see, winding them up every day. But he wouldn’t live in this room any more, being a disappointed man, as you might say, so we let it to Mr Zorn.’

  ‘I see,’ said Nigel.

  Mrs Bolster curtsied, to the extent that her figure allowed it, and retired. Nigel prowled about the room. The chairs and sofas were of a startling variety of shape but looked all uniformly uncomfortable. The book-case contained a most extraordinary conglomeration of books: the plays of Shakespeare rubbed shoulders with an earnest work on How to Develop Self-Confidence; next to them came Freud’s Introductory Lectures, a complete Ella Wheeler Wilcox, bound—apparently—in sponge, a manual on cycling, From Powder Monkey to Admiral, the Sermons of the Rev. Spurgeon, The Care of Mules, The Divine Comedy, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, Rovering to Success. The pictures represented, in the main, courting scenes of the eighteenth century; consumptive blondes, splayed out on rustic benches or posed before marble urns, received the addresses of improbable-looking young men in three-cornered hats, riding-boots and skintight breeches. The insipidity of these pictures was relieved by a bloater hung from the frame of one, and a pair of braces festooned over another.

  ‘You know,’ said Nigel with awe, ‘this chap Sorn really is admirably consistent. What with the cattle bellowing outside, the clocks clacking away inside, the books, the pictures and all, he has created a perfect surrealist environment.’

  ‘I’ll surrealist him,’ growled the inspector. ‘Where did he take his walk on Thursday night, eh? Filling up Mrs Bolster with that stuff about fetching a book!’

  ‘Did you observe, though, the time when——?’

  Nigel’s point, whatever it might be, was drowned by an outburst of hellish din. The metallic torrent of ticking dwindled: a cuckoo shot out of the cuckoo clock and gave an excellent imitation of an owl hooting on a gallows tree; then there was a general wheezing, rumbling, hawking, belching, twanging and tittuping as the remaining ten clocks cleared their throats preparatory to striking four.

  ‘Really,’ shouted Nigel, ‘I think it was just as well the Second Coming didn’t happen. Father Bolster’d have to have a remarkably sharp ear to catch the Last Trump in the middle of all this shindy.’ As the hullabaloo died away, the door opened and Gabriel Sorn came in. When he saw them, his mobile, weak mouth involuntarily was drawn into a stubborn pout and his whole face seemed to close up. Nigel snapped his fingers: at last he had discovered who it was that Sorn resembled.

  ‘I’m surprised to see you indoors on a fine afternoon like this, Inspector,’ said Sorn with rather ghastly levity. ‘May I sit down? Do you wish me to face the light, or anything fancy like that?’

  The inspector brushed all this aside. His huge face rose up horrifically out of his uniform, pallid and somehow amorphous, like a giant ray, thought Nigel.

  ‘Now, sir, there are one or two questions I have to ask you. First, how long have you been aware of the contents of the late Mr Bunnett’s will?’

  ‘That’s easy. I don’t know anything about it yet.’

  ‘You were not aware, then, that he left the greater part of his estate to’—the inspector paused a second, scrutinising Sorn carefully—‘to your mother, Mrs Annabel Sorn?’

  The young man’s face took on an expression of almost theatrical surprise and consternation.

  ‘My mother?’ he gasped. ‘But that’s—I mean, why should he?’

  ‘That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Sorn, recovering himself. ‘Motive. But you can’t put anything on my mother: she’s in France, you know. Or is it me you’re after? Of course: Son kills Employer to save Widowed Mother from Destitution. How vulgar of you!’

  Sorn spoke through his nose in the snuffling voice that once was associated with Puritans and now, by some curious freak of succession, has been inherited by the aesthetic.

  ‘We shall be going into all that,’ said the inspector, no more disturbed by all this than was Carson by the barbed witticisms of Oscar Wilde. ‘Will you please tell me what was your association with the deceased, how it arose, etc.?’

  ‘He was an old friend of my mother’s. Soon after I left the university, he offered to take me into the brewery as a pupil; I believe there was some idea of my becoming a partner, if I “made good”—as you’d probably express it.’

  ‘I see. Salary?’

  ‘Oh, I got a little. It doesn’t amount to more than pocket money: and I have a small allowance from my mother. As you imply, I had every incentive to murder the old ruffian.’

  ‘So you did know about the will, eh?’

  ‘No, I didn’t, I’m not admitting anything. If you can’t understand——’

  ‘You know, Sorn,’ Nigel interposed, ‘I should lay off the irony. The inspector understands facts, but not figures of speech.’

  ‘
Where were you on the night of the murder?’

  ‘In bed.’

  ‘That’s funny. Your landlady says she heard you creeping downstairs again not long after you’d come in from the party.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Sorn, a little too quickly. ‘I came down to fetch a book.’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘The Great Wall of China, by Kafka, 7s. 6d. net.’ It all came very pat.

  ‘Then how do you account for the fact that you were seen near the brewery gates not very long after midnight?’

  Nigel sat up abruptly. The first he’d heard—oh, no, it was a long shot of the inspector’s, and very definitely below the belt, too. Of course, Tyler could always say it was a case of mistaken identity if Sorn tried to make a fuss about it. But there was no need. Sorn’s bravado collapsed. He hadn’t the nerve to carry through his own deception: his mouth twitched and saliva appeared at the corners of it.

  ‘I don’t—I suppose I can go for a walk, damn your eyes, if I want to.’

  ‘A curious time to choose for a walk, eh?’

  ‘Poets have curious habits, my good inspector.’

  ‘Such as—working in the dark, eh?’

  ‘Yes, if you like.’ Then Sorn perceived the double-entendre. ‘I wasn’t in the brewery, I had nothing to do with it, how dare you bully me like this!’ His snuffling voice rose into a dismal falsetto: Nigel felt hot and embarrassed.

  ‘No one is accusing you of anything—yet,’ said the inspector. ‘Why did you prime Mrs Bolster with this tale of going downstairs to fetch a book?’

  ‘Because, if you must know, when we found Bunnett in that copper and they said he must have been killed the night before, I knew you’d be coming nosing round asking where I’d been.’

  ‘I think,’ Nigel pointed out in his most dispassionate voice, ‘that is actually in Mr Sorn’s favour. If he’d committed the murder, he’d have attempted to establish his alibi as soon as possible. As it was, he didn’t do so until the evening after—at supper, Mrs Bolster said.’