Police at the Funeral (31 page)

Mr Campion held the door open for her, and was rewarded. Mrs Faraday stopped and smiled at him.

‘Don't worry,' she said. ‘This is the only shock from which you could not have protected me. I am very grateful for your presence here.'

‘My hat,' said Marcus as Campion closed the door, ‘I'm itching to get my hands on that chap. I suppose we couldn't accidentally tip him over the banisters? He doesn't know anything, do you think so?'

Mr Campion took off his spectacles. ‘It's the best thing that ever happened if he does,' he said. ‘We shan't be able to do much with him tonight, but we'll have a shot in the morning. I'm afraid old Stanislaus is going to be angry with me again. I'm glad you're going to stay the night. I have a feeling that something is going to happen.'

‘Something else?' said Marcus.

Campion nodded, but did not speak, for at this moment the door opened again and Uncle William returned. If Great-aunt Caroline had hoped that he would take himself directly to bed, she had underestimated him. He had come back prepared for war.

‘Now that Mother's gone to bed, let's have a go at that fellow,' he said, bounding into the room, his pink face glistening. ‘I don't know what the old lady thinks she's doing trying to get me out of the way. I'm not as young as I used to be, but I'm not the man I was in the mess at Jo'burg if I can't put that
blackguard under the table!
In vino veritas,
you know. We'll have the truth out of him.'

Marcus looked at Campion, and the expression upon his face was so comic that the other nearly laughed. Uncle William went on.

‘I've been thinking it over,' he said. ‘At last we're up against something we can deal with, something tangible, instead of all this poking about in the dark. Suppose I go in and have it out with him?'

Mr Campion hastily changed the subject. ‘I say, I have only one pair of pyjamas with me,' he remarked. ‘Can you lend Marcus a pair? He's staying the night.'

Faced with an even more simple problem than the eviction of Cousin George, Uncle William was at home.

‘Certainly, my boy,' he said. ‘Come up and I'll get you all you want.'

‘You go and look him out some things,' suggested Campion. ‘He's having Joyce's room. She's sleeping with Mrs Faraday.'

‘I'll find you everything,' said Uncle William. ‘Pyjamas, dressing-gown, shaving tackle. Be delighted.'

The moment his rotund form had disappeared up the staircase Campion turned to Marcus.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘Now or never.' And together they bore down upon Cousin George.

It was as well, Mr Campion considered as they entered the study of the late Dr Faraday of Ignatius for the purpose of putting Cousin George to bed, that the dead do not turn in their graves.

Cousin George, his collar and tie unloosed, his swollen face purple and sagging, wallowed across the desk which now had a surface like a four-ale bar on a Saturday night. He barely raised an eyelid as they entered, but as they advanced upon him he threw out his hand in an unwieldy gesture which wiped a soda-water siphon on to the ground.

‘What's the matter?' he demanded.

‘Bed,' said Campion clearly in his ear, and nodding to Marcus, he suddenly gripped the man beneath the arm and jerked him to his feet.

Cousin George struggled, and the strength of the man
surprised his captors. They were both determined, however, and in a few moments he found himself borne precipitately towards the door. He began to swear, revealing a vocabulary which indicated that he had travelled extensively.

‘Shut up,' said Marcus, suddenly taking the initiative. With a viciousness for which Mr Campion had not given him credit, he caught the two ends of Cousin George's tie, and, jerking them round the back of the man's neck, wound the silk about his wrist until he had a strangle-hold. Cousin George's voice grew fainter and he began to cough and gasp painfully.

‘Don't kill him,' protested Campion.

‘He's all right,' said Marcus. ‘Come on.'

The stairs were negotiated with comparatively little difficulty, and at length the struggling group came to a stop outside Andrew's room. Marcus released his hold on the man's neck and threw open the door.

‘Now then,' he said, ‘in he goes.'

Cousin George was shot unceremoniously into the room, Campion switched on the light, and they closed the door upon him. The key, left by the thoughtful Alice, confronted them, projecting from the outside lock. Marcus turned it and thrust it into his pocket just as a furious onslaught from within echoed throughout the house.

Uncle William, with a pair of unexpectedly vituperant pyjamas over his arm, put his head out of his door.

‘Oh, I missed it,' he said. ‘Never mind. There's tomorrow.'

Mr Campion straightened himself. ‘I expect he'll make a din for half an hour or so,' he said, raising his voice against the pandemonium. ‘We had better get to bed. We can't do much till the morning.'

Uncle William nodded. ‘By far the most sensible thing to do,' he agreed. ‘Come along, Marcus. I'll show you your room.'

It was at this moment that it occurred to Cousin George to sing the more obscene verses of a well-known chanty at the top of his voice.

MR CAMPION SAT
on the end of his bed watching the moonlight streaming into his room through the wide-open window. The house was at last in silence and darkness. Cousin George had made the night hideous for a good hour after he had been locked safely in his room, and a shaken household had lain awake quaking in its beds while unexpurgated versions of various nautical and military ballads, punctuated by violent crashes of furniture and crockery, resounded through the house.

Gradually Cousin George had wearied of. singing and had taken to shouting profanities and libels on his relatives at the top of his voice. Finally these also had ceased, and after much trampling a last stupendous crash had jarred the stately precincts of Socrates Close and silence had fallen, profound and soothing. Slowly the house had dropped off to sleep. Mr Campion alone sat watching.

The plain-clothes men had been removed from the garden two or three days before. Mr Oates's belief in his friend's intuition had not been sufficiently strong to warrant so expensive a guard.

Mr Campion sat silent in the moonlight. He had taken off his spectacles and also his coat and waistcoat. He wore a pullover tucked into his trousers, which were suspended by a belt. His sleeves were rolled up, and he had removed his watch and his signet ring. Arrayed thus, he had been sitting motionless on the end of his bed for perhaps two hours. Through the open window he could hear the chimes from the Roman Catholic church quite clearly.

He had just heard the clock strike a quarter to three, and the moonlight was waning, when he heard the sound which made him slip off his bed and creep stealthily to the window. Keeping close to the curtain, he waited, listening. The sound came again, a husky breathy whisper.

It was nearer now, and suddenly he made out the words,
simple ludicrous words, but in the night strangely terrifying.

‘Old Bee. . . . Old Bee. . . . Old Bee. . . .'

Campion stretched out a hand and gripped the sill, and then, exerting a slow and even force, he drew himself silently out into the opening of the window and peered down.

The garden was still faintly lit by the waning moonlight, and the strip of grass beneath his window was clear. He noticed that there was still a light in George's room, but no sound issued therefrom. As he waited, his ears strained, he heard the whisper again, this time much closer.

‘Old Bee. . . . Old Bee. . . .'

Then, even as he watched, a dark shape detached itself from the shadows beneath George's window, and the young man caught a glimpse of an uncouth stooping figure, doubly grotesque in the deceptive light. It might have been human, it might have been a gorilla fantastically clothed, but Campion saw it with a welcome quickening of his pulse. He leapt up on to the sill and stood for a moment poised above the apparition.

The figure on the ground twisted round and raised a white blur of a face to the window. In a moment he was off, streaking through the garden, a fantastic figure bounding along like a great black balloon on the end of a string.

Campion dropped to the ground, falling on his hands and knees upon the wet turf. He was on his feet again chasing after the fugitive, who led him unerringly towards the little gate into the lane at the far end of the kitchen garden. For so large a creature the quarry developed an extraordinary turn of speed, but Campion, his blood whipped by the cold air and his nerves strained by the hours of waiting, gained upon him, and on the stretch of rough grass before the gate he overtook the flying figure, and, hurling himself upon it, brought it heavily to the ground.

The stranger grunted, and the next moment Campion was seized in a steel grip and dragged ignominiously over his opponent's head. The mysterious visitor, whoever he was, was not a negligible adversary. However, Mr Campion seemed to have achieved some of Marcus's viciousness, and he felt his pent-up wrath concentrating upon this tangible enemy. He scrambled to his feet and caught the stranger round the legs
in a rugger tackle just as he was about to make his escape, and it was at this point that Campion made the interesting discovery that the other's feet were bare.

The figure slumped to the ground again, Campion on top of him, and two immense hands came up out of the darkness and gripped the young man by the throat. In this moment of partial suffocation Campion realized with thankfulness that his opponent was unarmed. He struck out savagely, his knuckles coming into contact with a hard and stubbly chin. The stranger grunted and swore softly. Until now he had been terrifyingly silent.

Although he was lying upon his back his grip on Campion's throat did not relax, and he was revealing an almost simian strength. The grip was becoming a strangle-hold when Campion lurched forward, driving his knee into the other man's wind. The hold on his throat relaxed and the man doubled up, gasping.

He was by no means beaten, however. He rained unscientific blows with his huge flails of arms, battering the young man's lean sides and unprotected head. Campion straddled himself across the great body, and exerting every ounce of his strength, drove punch after punch into the man's face. He was fighting like a maniac, and the other, although he certainly possessed the greater strength, was evidently out of training. Gradually the rain of flail blows slackened, and Campion, driving his knee steadily into the other's wind, had him gasping and writhing like a fish out of water. Without relinquishing his position, Campion bent forward.

‘Had enough?' he whispered.

‘Yus,' said the voice huskily, and relapsed into breathless grunting.

‘You're Old Bee, aren't you?' said Mr Campion, risking yet another shot in the dark.

‘I'm no one,' said the man suddenly, and exerting an unexpected reserve of strength, pitched his captor on to the turf again, at the same time catching him a blow on the side of the head which made the bones of his skull crunch together.

It did not knock him out, however. Through a maze of eddying blackness Campion lurched back and caught the panting
creature just as he rose again to the attack. This time luck rather than judgment favoured him. He stumbled, cannoning into the other and catching him in the pit of the stomach with his head. His opponent let out a roar and doubled up. Campion wriggled from beneath the choking mass, which threatened to suffocate him, and staggered to his feet at the precise moment that a third figure loomed up out of the half darkness and turned a torch full upon his face.

‘Hullo, sir, what's up?'

It was young Christmas, whose cottage faced on to the lane at the corner of the garden, not twenty yards distant. Campion pulled himself together with an effort. He was still dizzy, but his purpose remained clear in his mind.

‘Bring that torch over here,' he said breathlessly. ‘Let's see what we've got.'

Young Christmas, a large, raw-boned young man of thirty or so, advanced cautiously towards the writhing object on the ground and turned his torch full upon it. Mr Campion's antagonist lay revealed.

He made an extraordinary spectacle lying spreadeagled upon the ground, gasping as though his last hour had come. He was a shortish man, powerfully built, with immense arms. His face was surrounded by creases of fat and almost covered with a short, stubbly beard of indeterminate hue, while his long matted hair was plentifully flecked with grey. For the rest, he was indescribably dirty, and blackened lips and broken nose did not add to the charm of his appearance. He was dressed in ragged green-black garments, none of which made any pretence of fitting him. But it was at his feet, sticking out from beneath his ragged trouser legs, that young Christmas was staring.

‘Lurnme!' he said. ‘Look at 'em. It's him!'

Once glance at the monstrous extremities half covered by the remnants of odd socks was sufficient. Here, without doubt was the origin of the print upon the flower-bed.

The sight of these feet seemed to restore Mr Campion's mental balance.

‘Here, I say,' he said, ‘can you let me bring this fellow into your place? I fancy he's going to have a good deal to say.'

‘Why, yes, sir, I'll get a light.' Young Mr Christmas was a
little startled, but eminently obliging. ‘I 'eard a bit of a noise, sir,' he said, ‘so I come out to see what was up. What about this chap 'ere?'

‘I'll bring him in,' said Mr Campion grimly.

Seated in a chair by the side of Mr Christmas's table, and seen by the light of a swinging oil lamp, the intruder looked even less prepossessing than he had done in the garden. His small, grey-green eyes shifted furtively from side to side, and he stirred uncomfortably, half rubbing, half scratching the injured portions of his unpleasant self somewhere within the rag-bag drapery which was his costume.