Dancers in Mourning (34 page)

Miss Finbrough seemed to be on the verge of collapse.

‘Business?' she said faintly.

‘Well, poisoning then.' Mercer was happily oblivious of the contretemps. ‘That little dance thing I was mucking about with turned out very well. I've got something good there. Dill doesn't like my title, “Pavane for a Dead Dancer.” He wants to try some other idea. These lyric-writers think they're little tin gods. He feels it's highbrow or something.'

‘He probably feels it's in very bad taste, sir,' snapped Uncle William, getting the rebuke in adroitly before he could be stopped.

‘Bad taste?' The other man was genuinely surprised at first, but afterwards, when he suddenly saw the objection, he defended himself irritably. ‘Don't be a
perishing
fool,' he said with quite unnecessary violence. ‘All this other affair will be forgotten long before we can get a song out. If you're going to talk poppycock like that it shows you don't understand the public mind any more than the average dirty-nosed child. You, for instance, do you remember what was in the papers six months ago? Of course you don't!'

Uncle William began to simmer. He shared the practically universal belief that the word ‘public' is opprobrious when applied to almost any other noun and more particularly so when it is allied to the word ‘mind.' He felt himself insulted and was about to say so when a fortunate diversion was caused by the arrival of a soberly-clad Lugg, who announced that Mr Mercer's car was at the door.

The composer got up hastily.

‘Is it?' he said. ‘Good. I don't want to miss that train. Did I leave my coat in here? Are you sitting on it, Linda? No, it must be outside. Find it, Lugg, will you? Good-bye, Linda. I may drop round on you tonight if I'm not too tired when I get in.'

He went out with rather more clumsiness than usual, and the girl looked after him.

‘He's made himself very ill,' she remarked. ‘Jimmy's terribly worried about him. Quinine is filthy stuff. It makes one feel beastly. Fancy getting all that down him – a whole tablespoonful!'

‘Miracle to me he didn't take the whole bottle, the fuss he was makin' over a little cold,' said Uncle William unsympathetically. ‘Wonderful to be so interested in one's ailments. Jimmy ought to snub that feller. Think I'll go up and see Jimmy, by the way. He'll be awake by now. I'd like a word with him.'

Miss Finbrough made a sound that was midway between a sob and a hiccup.

‘You can't,' she said flatly.

‘Oh?' The old man turned slowly in his chair to look at her and as the silence grew the others imitated him until she was in a circle of startled and inquiring eyes.

‘Why not, Finny?' There was a hint of sharpness in Linda's tone as she put the question.

‘He's not there. He's gone. He went out early in the car. If the police ask for him I was to tell them he'd be at the theatre after eleven o'clock.'

Miss Finbrough spoke with a dullness which gave her voice a spurious complacency.

Linda flushed.

‘But I haven't seen him,' she said. ‘I didn't even see him last night. Hasn't he left any message for me?'

‘He's very worried, Mrs Sutane.' The other woman was reproachful. ‘He knocked at my door at five this morning and told me to go down and make him some breakfast. I got everything ready and then he wouldn't eat it. He just rushed into the kitchen, swallowed a cup of tea, and then went off in the car.'

She began to tremble violently and took out a crumpled handkerchief.

‘You'll have to excuse me,' she said. ‘I don't feel well. That's the only message he left.'

Even in her agitation the ghost of her dominating personality remained. Somehow it enhanced her weakness. She went out and presently Linda followed her.

Uncle William looked up.

‘Remarkable thing,' he said. ‘Convey anythin' to your mind, Campion?'

Campion did not reply. He pottered round the room for a minute or two and then, having convinced himself that the women were safely upstairs and Uncle William lost in his own unhappy thoughts, he went out to the kitchen and borrowed two iron weights from the cook's scales.

In the privacy of the small music-room he fitted the four-ounce disc into the eight-ounce one and tied them both in a handkerchief. Then, opening the window wide at the bottom, he stepped back and pitched the white bundle as far as he could into the most thickly-shrubbed portion of the garden before him.

It went over the wall into the kitchen garden and he hurried after it, sliding over the low window-sill on to the iron-hard turf below. It was not hard to find. The white heap lay between two rows of lettuces. He picked it up and with his eye measured a wide arc with himself at a point on the circumference and the window as the centre.

His line lay through some currant bushes, over a couple of paths and an onion bed, and ended at the wall on one side and a marrow patch at the other.

He made his search carefully, making a width allowance of four yards either way.

The marrow bed yielded nothing save a fine collection of surprising gourds, but at the further box hedge along the second path he stopped abruptly. It was here that the clipping had ceased and the gardener had paused and laid down his shears at noon on the Saturday before. His barrow and garnering boards were still there by the side of the path.

Campion walked on slowly until his eyes rested upon a dark irregularity in the smooth, sharp outlines of the newly clipped shrubs.

When at last he found it he plunged his hand down among the dense springy branches and a sigh escaped him. He slipped his handkerchief off the weights in his pocket and used the cambric to protect his find from his own finger-prints.

The birds sang, and the scent of flowers from the other garden came over the low wall on a breath of sparkling sunlit air as he stood looking down at his discovery.

It was a silver-plated bicycle lamp.

T
HE
clubroom of the ‘Hare and Hounds' was overfilled with furniture in spite of its size. The vast table, at which sat Chief Inspector Yeo, Detective-Sergeant Inchcape, both of the C.I.D. Central Branch, Chief Inspector Cooling of the County Constabulary and Mr Albert Campion, private and unwilling investigator, supported, as well as the paraphernalia belonging to these gentlemen, thirty-seven ash-trays, each inscribed with varying advertising matter, a polyanthus rose-tree in a remarkable pot, a cracked bottle of solidified ink and a Bible with a red marker.

The rest of the room was in keeping with this centrepiece, and contained some very fine connoisseurs' specimens of early camera portraiture.

‘He wiped the lamp and simply pitched it out of sight, thinking that no one would remark on it even if it were found. He's been reckoning entirely without the major. We weren't expected to find out how that explosion originated.'

Yeo made the pronouncement with a gravity befitting his position as the most authoritative person present, and the local inspector, who was a fine solid man of military smartness, nodded his grave agreement.

Yeo glanced down at the typewritten sheets of notes before him.

‘As soon as you turned the lamp in yesterday, Mr Campion, we saw at once that it was clean-wiped,' he said, ‘and of course we recognised it from the manufacturer's specifications. They are prepared to swear that it is the actual lamp they delivered with the bicycle. Inchcape here reported your evidence about the hedge-clipping and I'm inclined to agree with you. The gardener must have found it if it had been there when he cut the box. That fixes the time it entered the hedge as somewhere between twelve noon on the Saturday and, I think we may presume, ten-fifty on the Sunday morning when Konrad took the bike away. Who was in the house during that time?'

Inspector Cooling sighed.

‘Thirty-seven persons off and on,' he said sadly. ‘We've interviewed about half of 'em so far. Well, we'll carry on. It's spadework that does it.'

Yeo grimaced.

‘There's only the family and Mr Faraday, not counting Mr Campion, at the house now, I take it?' he said. ‘I shall go down there again this afternoon. Sutane has a matinée, of course. He didn't come home at all last night, did he?'

‘He stayed at his flat in Great Russell Street, sir. He often does before a matinee.' Sergeant Inchcape supplied the information gladly from his meagre store. ‘They're all at the house with the exception of the young lady, Miss Eve Sutane. She went to town on Wednesday and has not yet returned. Her absence escaped my notice on Thursday, but I learnt of her visit to friends from a maid yesterday, Friday. The explanation given to the household is that her brother thought she needed a little change. Miss Finbrough gave that out.'

He paused and sucked his teeth, an appalling habit which he allowed to punctuate his every second remark. It gave him a consequential, self-satisfied manner which was either irritating or amusing according to the temperament of his hearer.

‘Have you got the address?' Yeo inquired. ‘No. Well, it doesn't matter. I'll pick it up when I go down this afternoon. It's of no importance, but we may as well keep on the careful side.'

He glanced at Campion.

‘We're still up against the same old snag. There's still no motive,' he observed. ‘We're grateful for the lamp – very grateful – don't think we're not, but that only proves what we knew already, you know. The crime emanated from that house. The lamps were changed there. But who amongst the whole outfit should want to do such a thing is still a mystery. Isn't that so?'

His final question was addressed to his police colleagues, who murmured their agreement and followed his glance to the tall, thin man who sat amongst them.

Campion was lounging in his chair, his hands in his pockets and his eyes half-closed. He might have forgotten the conference.

‘I was saying, Mr Campion, as you were on the inside you were the one to spot the motive,' prompted Yeo. ‘What are you thinking?'

Campion glanced at him out of the corner of his eye.

‘“There are forty policemen sitting in this room, but I would rather have you, my darling,”' he said.

‘Beg your pardon?' Yeo sounded startled.

Campion got up. He was laughing, but without deep amusement.

‘It's out of a play,' he said. ‘Sir James Barrie wrote it. It's a sort of fairy story. You wouldn't know it. I'll wander along now, if I may. Should I find any more spare parts I'll ring you. See you this afternoon. I'm doing all I can.'

As the door closed behind him the county inspector smiled with unexpected sympathy.

‘He feels his position, don't he?' he remarked. ‘He's a friend down at the house. It's not very nice.'

Yeo raised his eyebrows.

‘A man can't have friends in our profession,' he said with dignity. ‘Right's right and wrong's wrong. He knows that. He's been to school.'

Cooling nodded, not wishing to disagree in any way with the distinguished visitor and most especially so on such an incontrovertible point.

Mr Campion walked back down the dusty lower road. He passed the Old House and avoided Mrs Geodrake, who eyed him wistfully from the front garden, where she was weeding with ostentatious assiduity. He observed the A.A. phone-box where Konrad had rung up Beaut Siegfried on the night Chloe Pye had died, and came up through the woods where Uncle William's bird's-nest still perched empty and forgotten.

He made a solitary and somewhat forlorn figure. Even the sight of Lugg, vast and impressive in a cut-away coat and posed ridiculously in a flower-bed as he indicated suitable blooms for Sarah to cut for the drawing-room bowl, did not move him to comment.

He felt he was chained to a very slow avalanche. Sooner or later, today or tomorrow, it must gain impetus and roar down in all its inevitable horror, breaking and crushing, defeating and destroying. He could do nothing to impede it. With an effort he might possibly accelerate its present pace, but he did not want to. White Walls lay quiet in the shimmering sunlight. In the beds the blue butterflies flirted brightly with the flowers. The light wind was warm and caressing.

Surely the night, tomorrow night, the next rainy day, surely, surely one of these would be time enough?

But at that moment, of course, he knew nothing of the shabby little coupé drawn up on the verge by the side of the Birley road.

Sock phoned at three o'clock before Yeo had put in his promised appearance. Lugg brought Campion to the telephone and he took the message and made his inevitable offer.

‘I'm at Birley station.' Sock's young voice sounded thin over the wire. ‘I can't get a cab anywhere. Someone pinched my car yesterday. What? Oh, in the usual place at the end of the alley. I was a fool to leave it there, but it's cheaper than a garage. Some ass simply walked off with it. Yes, rather, the new one, blast him!'

‘I'll run down for you.' Campion sounded friendly. ‘No, I won't worry the chauffeur. My dear chap, I've got nothing to do. In fifteen minutes, then.'

He passed the coupé on his way to the station. White Walls was some way off the beaten track and the nearest way to the railway lay across a belt of meadow land between two main roads. The lanes were in good repair if not much frequented, and Campion drove fast.

The blue coupé had been parked on the wide grass verge and sat there shabby and forlorn, with its windows closed; it might have been there for ten minutes or ten years, and Campion barely noticed it as he sped past.

Sock came clattering down the station steps as the Lagonda climbed the hill. He was a little more presentable in costume than usual, but his dark youthful face was worn and strained and there was an irritating air of suppressed excitement about him, as though he were conscious of taking a part in strange and important events.

‘This is extremely good of you,' he said as he sank into the comfort of the front seat. ‘I'm lost without a bus of some sort. I had to come down. I must see Jimmy and the only time to get hold of him these days is at the week-end. I hope we don't have to take the show off. We'll know on Monday.'