Arthur Upfield - Murder Must Wait

“That poor woman!”Mrs Delph again collapsed to the cushion. “I don’t know what will happen next. No, I never met her. She didn’t belong in our set.”

“Have you met the mothers of those other stolen babies?”

“Only Mrs Bulford and Mrs Coutts. I wouldn’t know the others, socially. Why are you asking all these questions, Inspector?”

“In order to find your missing baby and return him to you. You have not received a demand for ransom?”

“No.” Mrs Delph again won composure. “I… we would have paid it, if it had been demanded.” She added sharply: “Did any of those other women receive a ransom demand?”

“No. How long has Dr Delph been in practice here?”

“Almost seven years now. But we’ve been married only two years, and although I’m not young I wanted a baby of my own.”

“Was it customary for the nurse girl to collect parcels when the baby was in her charge?”

“It was not. The chauffeur-gardener does that. But that day he had to take my husband to four outlying cases, and I wanted that dress. I never dreamed she would leave the child outside the shop.”

“You know the shop, of course?”

“Certainly.”

“It was a busy afternoon, and the shop too crowded to accommodate a pram. Because of this the girl left the pram outside. Don’t you think too much blame is attached to the girl?”

“No, I certainly do not,” replied Mrs Delph, grey eyes granite-hard. “She could have wheeled the pram just inside the door. It would have been all right there. Madame Clare wouldn’t have minded, knowing it was my baby. There was no excuse for leaving the pram outside… unless the girl was an accomplice of the thief… which wouldn’t surprise me.”

Bony rose.

“Beyond your family circle, you know no person who took an inordinate interest in the child?”

“No one. Please, no more questions. It is all so terrible, and I can’t bear to talk about it.”

“Thank you for being so co-operative under such tragic circumstances,” murmured Bony, and Mrs Delph again closed her eyes and sighed.“Aurevoir! And do permit yourself to hope.”

The sound of Mrs Delph’s sobbing accompanied them to the front door. Together they walked the gravelled path to the street gate, where Alice turned quickly to look back at the house. In the taxi, Bony gave an address to the driver and to Alice said:

“Why were you so intolerant of Mrs Delph’s natural grief?”

“Because she was putting it on,” Alice replied bitterly. “I know that kind. She’s tough, heartless, selfish to the backbone. And a dirty snob.”

“You don’t mean that Mrs Delph was pretending to be grieved?”

“Over to you. We left her flat on the settee: she watched us walk to the gate, from behind the window curtain. They will touch the curtains when they’re watching. I could never understand why.”

Alice sat bolt upright when it was easy to relax, and the straw hat angled severely over her brow as if to emphasise her mood.

“Where are we going now?” she asked, hopefully.

“To interview the nurse girl.”

“Good! We’ll get something out of her.”

“You will soft-pedal,” Bony said quietly.

She looked at him, then her anger subsided and she said, as soft as a whisper:

“I’m sorry, Bony. I… that woman infuriated me. I’ll play poker.”

“Good girl.”

After that neither spoke till the taxi stopped outside a small house in a sun-heated street appearing to have no beginning and no end.

“I will enquire if the nursemaid is home,” Bony said. “Should I beckon, please come to my aid.”

The door was opened to him by a matronly woman who said her daughter was working at the cannery, and so followed a further journey of fifteen minutes to reach the huge iron structure which swallowed fruit by the truck-load. The manager conducted them through the maze within.

Here a hundred people were working. From a distant point gleaming tins were conveyed by belt and wire guides to the benches where girls were de-stoning peaches and other fruit. Seven semi-nude men tended the fires beneath the vats cooking jam. Above the rattle of machinery was the hammering of the ‘casers’, and case after filled case was being added to the mountain along one wall.

Amid this ordered chaos, they were presented to Miss Betty Morse.

Peaches and Bullion

BETTYMORSEquickened a man’s eyes, which is different from stirring his pulses. She was wearing a light-blue smock, and her hair had caught the bronze of the sky and held it fast. Her arms were bare, and the knife she put down was the wickedest-looking weapon Bony had seen outside the police museum. The manager having left them, he said in his easy manner:

“I understand, MissMorse, that you work here on contract rates, so perhaps you could talk as you work. Think you could? I don’t want to hinder you.”

“You won’t, Inspector,” she told him, and, selecting a peach, sliced it once, plucked out the stone and dropped the halved peach into a tin. The knife was razor-sharp, the operation complete in two seconds.

“You are sure you won’t be distracted and cut yourself?”persisted the doubtful Bony, and turning to him she laughed, and the horrible knife appeared to do its work of its own volition. Beyond her, other girls were displaying equal dexterity; some were gossiping to their neighbours, their hands working automatically, their minds busy with boy friends.

“I’ve told over and over again all about Mrs Delph’s baby,” asserted Betty Morse a trifle edgily. “The baby simply vanished from the pram outside the shop when I was inside getting a parcel.”

“You must be bored, Miss Morse,” Bony soothed. “Personally I’d rather talk about peaches, and how many tins you fill in a day, and what is the highest money you’ve earned in a week. My cousin here, who wants to be a detective, is more interested in babies than I am at the moment, but, like you, I have to work for my living. When you took Mrs Delph’s baby out in the pram did anyone stop and show interest in it?”

“No. It was just an ordinary kid. It wasn’t really my fault it was stolen. Plenty of women leave a baby in a pram outside a shop. Mrs Delph had no cause to yell and scream for the police, and tell them to arrest me.”

“Bit of an old bitch,” remarked Alice, and the indignation on Betty’s face gave way to astonishment, followed by obvious gratitude that here at last was someone who sympathised.

“You’re telling me,” she vowed warmly.“Screamed the place down. Said rotten things about me. Yelled for cook to ring for the police, and told the policeman that I’d sold the baby and he was to search me for the money.”

“Excitable woman,” observed Bony, but Betty Morse was no longer interested in him. The knife flashed, the peaches fell apart and their stones dropped into a pail at her feet. For only a tenth of every second did she look at what her hands were doing as she poured out her story of martyrdom to Alice, who energetically nodded and oh-edand ah-ed, occasionally inserting a diversionary question and revealing to Bony that she had mastered the art of arriving via the roundabout.

Thenceforth he was kept in his box to listen and watch with prolonged aversion the gleaming knife attacking the fruit with seemingly ever-increasing speed as Betty Morse became really warmed up. A boy came to empty peaches into her tray. A man came to remove the filled tins and make a note on her pad, and when there should have been a gallon of spilt blood there wasn’t a speck. Bony was forgotten, but was entranced.

It came out that Mrs Delph’s cook knew more about theDelphs than they could possibly know about each other. The husband managed a very extensive practice. He was working himself to death, and only kept on his feet with the aid of whisky ‘planted’ in the garage. There was no reason to hide booze in the garage as there was plenty of it in the house. He was ‘a nice old thing’, although Bony was aware that Dr Delph was not turned forty. His wife was the daughter of a parson, had married ‘somewhat late in life’. Bony knew she wasn’t more than thirty-five. She was ‘stuck up’, a delicate type, was given to ‘turns’ to get her way with her husband. And, they didn’t sleep together. When she found she was going to have a baby, she sacked the cook four times in the one day, screamed at her husband, and moaned for a week.