‘Now that’ll do from you, my gal!’ responded Mr Willows, eyeing her sternly. ‘You eat un up, and no nonsense! Here I feeds ’ee, day in, day out, as very few men feeds their wimmin-folk, I’ll lay, and that’s your gratitude! Where’d ’ee be now, I wonder, if I ’adn’t see ’ee et well, eh?’
‘In – in ’eaven, Geordie, I shouldn’t wonder,’ replied Mrs Willows, desperately anxious to give the answer which would placate him by coinciding with his own opinions.
Mr Willows snorted.
‘Then you et un up,’ he replied pithily.
‘Nice goings-on in the village last Sunday night, I ’ear,’ observed Mrs Willows tentatively, when, breakfast over, her husband prepared to settle down in the doorway with a pipe.
‘You’re right, my lass. There was. Who’s bin talking wi’ you about it?’
‘Oh, young Percy Noon was passing on his way to work and stopped to say thankee for them there young shallots. Said I’d tell when ’ee came ’ome. Percy says as how Squire Sethleigh’s gone off to the States sudden-like, and young Mr Wright, up where ’ee bin working this morning, is going off’s ’ead. Give I a turn, it did, to think of ’ee working there along. Percy did say as how he went clumping young Farmer Galloway over the head wi’ a hog-pudden in the bar of the “Queen’s Head”, and as how Galloway he took and give un the biggest thrashing out, and Bill Bondy, not liking to interfere, held the watch and see fair play. And Squire’s cousin, that young Mr Redsey, Percy do say, was lying dead drunk in the middle of it all.’
‘Well, that’s the news that was round the village yesterday,’ said Mr Willows. ‘There’s more to tell this morning. Made me late for my breakfast, going off along to know the truth of it.’
‘Well, there now! If I didn’t watch and wait at the gate, wondering what had come over ’ee at all to be so late for breakfast,’ said Mrs Willows.
‘Ah! Very likely ’ee did wonder. ’Ee’ll wonder more when I do be telling ’ee all. There’s bin a murder done at the butcher’s in the market down in Bossbury.’
‘A murder? Lawk a-massy I! ’Ee’ll sleep home to-night, Geordie, won’t ’ee?’
‘Happen I will. Nothing much doing at the major’s this afternoon. The roses can do wi’ a spray, for the green fly is mortal busy up along of ’em, and I set the lad to weed the gravel yesterday, so he can go on wi’ that again. The chrysants is coming on nice, and the strawberries looks a treat. But what ails you? You don’t want for company wi’ all the little ’uns in the ’ouse wi’ you!’
‘I be mortal feared o’ that there murder, Geordie!’
Mr Willows took the pipe out of his mouth and spat with accuracy and finality.
‘There won’t be any call for ’ee to be worriting, my lass,’ he observed. ‘Nobody don’t want to murder ’ee. Happen ’ee ’en’t important enough to be murdered. What’s that clock say?’
II
‘And what I say is,’ pronounced Mrs Eulalie Blenkins to the assembled meeting of mothers in the Chapel Parlour, ‘I say it’s a judgment on Henry Binks. A man was never meant to make his living out of killing the dumb animals and offering their carcasses for sale. I’m a vegetarian myself, though I can’t persuade Robert into it, I’m sorry to say. I was converted to it when I lived in Blackwater. A good mistress she was, and not hard to please. “But there’s one thing, Sarah,” she says – not liking to call me Eulalie as it’s such a mouthful, and disliking Polly as being a sort of a skittish name, so she always called me Sarah, which is not unsuited to me, Robert’s second name being Abraham – “there’s one thing,” she says, “that I can’t abide. And that’s butcher’s meat,” she says. “We’re all vegetarians here, and Christian Science too,” she says, “and if you’ll promise to be likewise, well, I like your looks,” she says, “and I’d like to give you the place.” So vegetarian I been ever since, though I stuck out about the Christian Science on account of being a Wesleyan, and you can’t get your money from the State Insurance, you see, without a certificate from the doctor.’
An older woman leaned forward.
‘But what’s all this got to do with Henry Binks?’ she asked. ‘A very respectable man. Sober, too.’
‘He hasn’t done nothing that I know of. At least,’ amended Mrs Blenkins piously, ‘I hope it isn’t him that’s done it. It’s what he found.’ She lowered her voice to a blood-curdling whisper. ‘Human joints, my dear, all hanging up on the hooks where he generally hangs his beef and lamb on a Tuesday morning!’
There was a hushed and horrified silence, and a long pause. Then one bold spirit, running her needle in and out of the seam of a nightshirt destined to cover the nakedness of darkest Africa, enquired breathlessly:
‘Human joints? Why, whatever do you mean, Polly Blenkins?’
Mrs Eulalie Blenkins glanced around her. The minister’s wife and the rather dull book from which she was accustomed to read aloud to the assembled sisterhood of matrons had not yet put in an appearance, so Polly hitched her chair a little more closely to the questioner’s and replied softly, while the rest of the circle also hitched up their chairs and strained their ears and paused in their work to listen:
‘Yes. This morning first thing he found them. Of course, Henry Binks lives over his shop in the Purley Road, and he has also got the lease of a lock-up butcher’s shop in the market, although the lock-up still goes under the name of Smith, which was old Tom Smith as used to live over Border’s the grocer’s in Queen Street. He’s gone now, poor old man, and Henry Binks that took over the lease of the lock-up in the market has never troubled himself to have the name painted out and his own put there instead. Well, Monday not being a good day in his line of business, Henry Binks never troubles to go down and open the lock-up till Tuesday, but every Monday he just contents himself with selling a few odds and ends at the shop in the Purley Road. Well, first thing this morning, then, being Tuesday, he goes down to the market shop, leaving his wife and son to manage the Purley Road shop as usual, and what does he find?’
She paused, with true dramatic instinct.
‘I tell you what Henry Binks found,’ she said. ‘He found a body, a human body, all cut up into joints as neat as he could have done it himself, and all hung up on his hooks, as he could see when he took down the shutters. His very tools had been used to do the job and everything, so folks do say. The police is keeping them for fingerprints, my young nephew told me. An ’orrible sight it must have been! They say when Henry Binks see what it all was he fainted dead away, butcher though he is!’
III
‘Fingerprints? We took hundreds of ’em. Identify the corpse? We can’t, not yet awhile. Hold Henry Binks? On what charge? Oh, he’s under observation, all right. You needn’t worry. But there’s nothing to arrest him for. Scotland Yard? ’Ere, you clear out of this, quick, else I’ll run you in for obstruction!’
The only reporter the Bossbury Sun could afford grinned cheerfully at the harassed constable who had been left in charge of Henry Binks’s little lock-up shop in the Bossbury covered market, and walked away briskly. The usual crowd of morbid persons who immediately rush to any locality where murder has been committed were lined up in front of the shop, anxious to be at the scene of one of the more unsavoury and horrifying crimes of the decade. The constable, having got rid of the young reporter, fixed his eye on a market sign which hung about three feet above the heads of the sightseers and resumed his stand-at-ease position. He wondered what credit – if any – would accrue to him for having been first on the scene after Henry Binks the butcher had made his appalling discovery that morning.