Circus (5 page)

The voice in the receiver was hoarse and shaking. It said: ‘Fawcett? Fawcett? Is that you, Fawcett?'

‘Yes. Who's that?'

‘I can't tell you over the phone. You know damn well who it is. You got me into this.' The voice was trembling so much as to be virtually unrecognizable. ‘For God's sake get down here, something terrible has happened.'

‘What?'

‘Get down here.' The voice was imploring. ‘And for God's sake come alone. I'll be in my office. The circus office.'

The line went dead. Fawcett jiggled the receiver bar but dead the line remained. Fawcett hung up, left the room, locked the door behind him, took the lift to the underground garage and drove down to the circus through the darkness and the rain.

The external circus lights were out except for some scattered weak illumination – it was already late enough for all the circus members to have sought their night accommodation aboard the train. Fawcett left the car and hurried into the animal quarters, where Wrinfield had his shabby little portable office. The lighting here was fairly good. Signs of human life there were none, which Fawcett, on first reaction, found rather surprising, for Wrinfield had a four-footed fortune in there: the second and almost immediate reaction was that it wasn't surprising at all for nobody in his right mind was going to make off with an Indian elephant or Nubian lion. Not only were they difficult animals to control, but disposal might have
presented a problem. Most of the animals were lying down, asleep, but the elephants, asleep or not and chained by one foreleg, were upright and constantly swaying from side to side and in one large cage twelve Bengal tigers were prowling restlessly around, snarling occasionally for no apparent reason.

Fawcett made for Wrinfield's office then halted in puzzlement when he saw no light coming from its solitary window. He advanced and tested the door. It wasn't locked. He opened it and peered inside and then all the world went black for him.

Wrinfield hardly slept that night, which, considering the recent events and the worries they had brought in their wake, was hardly a matter for surprise. He finally rose about five o'clock, showered, shaved and dressed, left his luxurious quarters aboard the train and headed for the animal quarters, an instinctive practice of his whenever he was deeply troubled, for Wrinfield was in love with his circus and felt more at home there than anywhere in the world: the degree of rapport that existed between him and his animals certainly exceeded that which had existed between him and the reluctant economics students whom – as he now regarded it – he had wasted the best years of his life teaching. Besides, he could always pass the time with Johnny the night watchman who, despite the vast gulf in status that lay between them, was an old crony and confidant of his. Not that Wrinfield had any intention of confiding in anyone that night.

But Johnny wasn't there and Johnny wasn't the man ever to fall asleep on the job, undemanding though it was – his job was to report to the trainer concerned or the veterinary surgeon any animal that might appear off-colour. No more than slightly puzzled at first, then with increasing anxiety, Wrinfield carried out a systematic search and finally located him in a dark corner. Johnny, elderly, wizened and crippled – he'd taken one fall too many from the low wire – was securely bound and gagged but otherwise alive, apparently unharmed and furiously angry. Wrinfield loosened the gag, undid the bonds and helped the old man to his shaking legs. A lifetime in the circus had left Johnny with an extraordinary command of the unprintable and he didn't miss out a single epithet as he freely unburdened his feelings to Wrinfield.

Wrinfield said: ‘Who did this to you?'

‘I don't know, boss. Mystery to me. I didn't see anything. Didn't hear nothing.' Tenderly, Johnny rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Sandbagged, it feels like.'

Wrinfield examined the back of his scrawny neck. It was badly bruised and discoloured but the skin unbroken. Wrinfield put an arm round the frail shoulders. ‘Sandbagged you were. Come on. A seat in the office. I've got a little something there that'll set you up. Then we get the police.'

They were halfway towards the office when Johnny's shoulders stiffened under the supporting arm and he said in an oddly harsh and strained
voice: ‘I reckon we've got something a bit more important than a sandbagging to report to the cops, boss.'

Wrinfield looked at him questioningly, then followed the direction of his staring eyes. In the cage of the Bengal tigers lay the savagely mauled remains of what had once been a man. Only by the few shreds of clothing left him and the pathetically heroic row of medal ribbons did Wrinfield recognize that he was looking at all that remained of Colonel Fawcett. 

Wrinfield gazed in horrified fascination at the still pre-dawn scene – circus workers, artistes, policemen in uniform and plainclothes detectives all milling around the animal quarters, all of them busily engaged in eradicating forever any putative clues there may have been. Ambulance men were wrapping up the unidentifiable remains of Fawcett and placing it on a stretcher. In a small group remote from the others were Malthius, the tiger trainer, Neubauer the lion tamer and Bruno, the three men who had gone into the cage and taken Fawcett out. Wrinfield turned to the admiral, whom he had first called and who, since his arrival, hadn't bothered to explain his presence or identity to anyone and it was markedly noticeable that no policeman had approached him to ask him to justify his presence there; clearly, some senior police officer had said: ‘Do not approach that man!'

Wrinfield said: ‘Who in God's name could have done this terrible thing, sir?'

‘I'm terribly sorry, Mr Wrinfield.' It was completely out of character for the admiral to say that he was sorry about anything. ‘Sorry all round. Sorry for Fawcett, one of my ablest and most trusted deputies and a damned fine human being at that. And sorry for you, that I should have been responsible for involving you in this ghastly mess. This is the kind of publicity that any circus could do without.'

‘The hell with publicity. Who, sir, who?'

‘And I suppose I feel a bit sorry for myself, too.' The admiral shrugged his shoulders heavily. ‘Who? Obviously the same person or persons who killed Pilgrim. Your guess as to who they are is as good as mine. The one thing for sure is that they – whoever
they
are – knew he was coming down here or they wouldn't have silenced the guard in advance – he can count himself lucky that he wasn't found inside that cage with Fawcett. There was almost certainly a false phone call. We'll soon know. I have them checking on it.'

‘Checking on what?'

‘Every call to our office, incoming or outgoing, except, of course, on the scrambler phones, is recorded. With luck, we'll have that recording within minutes. Meantime, I'd like to talk to those three men who took Fawcett out of the cage. Individually. I understand that one of those men is your tiger trainer. What's his name?'

‘Malthius. But – but he's above suspicion.'

‘I don't doubt it.' The admiral was trying to be patient. ‘Do you think any murder mystery would ever be solved if we questioned only the suspects? Please have him brought.'

Malthius, a dark-eyed Bulgarian with an open face, was plainly deeply upset. The admiral said, kindly for him: ‘You've no need to be so distressed.'

‘
My
tigers did this, sir.'

‘They would probably do it to anyone in the country except you. Or would they?'

‘I don't know, sir. If a person were lying quietly, I really don't think so.' He hesitated. ‘But, well, under certain circumstances they might.' The admiral waited patiently and Malthius went on: ‘If they were provoked. Or – '

‘Yes?'

‘If they smelled blood.'

‘You're sure of that?'

‘Of course he's sure.' The admiral, who was quite unaware of Wrinfield's intense loyalty to his men, was surprised at the asperity in his voice. ‘What do you think, sir? We feed them on horse meat or beef and those are raw and smell of blood. The tigers can't wait to get at the meat and tear it to pieces with teeth and claws. Have you ever seen tigers at feeding-time?'

The admiral had a mental vision of how Fawcett must have died and shuddered involuntarily. ‘No, and I don't think I'll ever want to
either.' He turned back to Malthius. ‘So he could have been alive, conscious or not – blood doesn't flow when you're dead – stabbed and thrown into the cage?'

‘That is possible, sir. But you won't find a trace of a stab wound now.'

‘I realize that. You found the door locked on the outside. Is it possible to do that from the inside?'

‘No. You can bolt it from the inside. It wasn't bolted.'

‘Isn't that a rather curious arrangement?'

Malthius smiled for the first time, albeit faintly. ‘Not for a tiger trainer, sir. When I go into the cage I turn the key on the outside and leave it in position. Once I get inside I bolt the door – can't risk having the door swing open or being pulled open by one of the tigers and letting them loose among the crowd.' He smiled a second time, again without mirth. ‘It could come in useful for me, too. If things get unpleasant for me, I just slide the bolt, get away from there and turn the key on the outside.'

‘Thank you. Would you ask that friend of yours – '

‘Heinrich Neubauer, sir. The lion trainer.'

‘I'd like to see him.' Malthius walked dejectedly away and the admiral said: ‘He seems very unhappy to me.'

‘Wouldn't you be?' Again the unexpected asperity in Wrinfield's voice. ‘He not only feels
personally responsible but his tigers have for the first time acquired a taste for human flesh. Malthius is human flesh, too, you know.'

‘I hadn't thought of that.'

The admiral asked Neubauer a few desultory and inconsequential questions then asked for Bruno. When he arrived the admiral said: ‘You're the only one I really wanted to talk to. The other two were only a cover – we're being watched both by circus people and the police. Some of the police, by the way, think I'm a very senior police officer, others that I'm from the FBI, although why they should imagine that I can't imagine. A dreadful thing, Bruno, a quite dreadful thing. Well, it looks as if poor Fawcett was correct, we're being pushed to the limit to find out how really desperate we are to go to Crau. Well, I've been pushed far enough. Who knows who's going to be next? I have no right, no one has any right, to ask you to be involved in this ghastly business any more. There's a limit to patriotism – being patriotic did Pilgrim and Fawcett a great deal of good, didn't it? You are now released from any obligations, real or imagined, that you may have had.'

‘Speak for yourself.' Wrinfield's tone had remained unchanged. Whatever touched Wrinfield's beloved circus touched his rawest nerve: this had become a personal matter. ‘Two good men have died. You want them to have died in vain? I'm going to Europe.'

The admiral blinked and turned to Bruno. ‘And you?'

Bruno looked at him in a silence that verged on the contemptuous.

‘Well.' The admiral was momentarily nonplussed. ‘Off again, on again. If you're prepared to accept the risks, I'm prepared to accept your sacrifices. Utterly selfish, I know, but we desperately want those papers. I won't try to thank you, I honestly wouldn't know how to, but the least I can do is to arrange protection. I'll assign five of my best men to you – as a Press corps, shall
we
say? – then once you are aboard the boat – '

Bruno spoke in a very quiet voice. ‘If you assign any of your men to us, then nobody's going anywhere, and that includes me. And from what I'm told, although I don't understand it yet, if I don't go then there's no point in anyone else going anyway. The exception, of course, is Dr Harper, a dead man vouched for him and you can't get any better recommendation than that. As for the rest of your men – who do you think killed Pilgrim and Fawcett? Without their protection, we might have a chance.' Bruno turned abruptly and walked away. The admiral looked after him, with a slightly pained expression on his face, at a momentarily but highly unusual loss for words, but was saved the necessity of making comment by the arrival of a police sergeant carrying a small black box. That the uniform was not the property of the man inside it Wrinfield was
quite certain. When it came to local colour Charles – it was the only way Wrinfield could think of him – was not a man who missed much.

The admiral said: ‘The recording –' and when the sergeant nodded: ‘May we use your office, please, Mr Wrinfield?'

‘Of course.' Wrinfield looked around him. ‘Not here. In the train. Too many people.'

The office door closed behind them, the sergeant took the recorder from its casing and Wrinfield said: ‘What do you expect to hear?'

‘You.' Wrinfield looked his astonishment. ‘Or a very close approximation of your voice. Or Bruno's. Yours were the only two voices in the circus that Fawcett knew: he wouldn't have come for anyone else.'

They heard the recording through. At the end Wrinfield said calmly: ‘That's meant to be me. Shall we hear it again?'

They heard it through a second time then Wrinfield said positively: ‘That's not my voice. You know it isn't.'

‘My dear Wrinfield, I never dreamed it would be. I know it isn't.
Now
I know it isn't. But I had to hear it a second time to make sure. When a man speaks in that hurried and distressed fashion, his voice takes on abnormal overtones. A piece of silk stretched across the mouthpiece is a great help. I don't blame poor Fawcett for being fooled, especially when he had only the one thing on his mind at the time. But it's a damned good imitation
all the same.' The admiral paused, ruminated, then looked at Wrinfield consideringly. ‘To the best of my knowledge and belief, and to yours, you don't know and never have talked to any of my men. Right?' Wrinfield nodded. ‘So I put it to you that this call was made by someone who knew your voice intimately and had studied it.'

‘That's preposterous. If you're suggesting – '

‘Precisely what I
am
suggesting, I'm afraid. Look, man, if our organization can be infiltrated don't you think your damned circus can be too? After all, you've got twenty-five nationalities working for you: I've got only one.'

‘You're the CIA.
Everyone
would want to infiltrate the CIA. Who'd want to infiltrate a harmless circus?'

‘Nobody. But in the eyes of the ungodly you're not a harmless circus, you're an affiliate of the CIA and therefore ripe for infiltration. Don't let blind loyalty blind your intelligence. Let's hear that recording again. Only this time don't listen for your own voice, listen for someone else's. I should imagine you know the voice of every man in your employment. And to narrow the field, remember that most of your men speak with fairly heavy foreign accents. This is an Anglo-Saxon voice, probably American, although I can't be sure.'

They played the recording through four more times and at the end Wrinfield shook his head. ‘It's no good. The distortion is far too heavy.'

‘Thank you, officer, you may leave.' The sergeant snapped the case shut and left. Briefly the admiral paced up and down the full length of the office – three steps in either direction – then shook his head in the reluctant acceptance of the inevitable. ‘What a charming thought. A link up between my lot and yours.'

‘You're terribly certain.'

‘I'm terribly certain of one thing and that's this. There isn't one man in my lot who wouldn't give up his pension rather than open the door of a tiger's cage.'

Wrinfield nodded with an equally reluctant acceptance. ‘I suppose it's my turn to say that I should have thought of that.'