The Beckoning Lady (21 page)

“Wait, if you don't mind, Chief.” South was grinning down at them. “I've got the inquest at two o'clock. I wonder if you agree with me how this was done? The murderer must have stood here, on the far side of the stile, probably on the step.”

Luke went over at once and together they worked out the crime with a painstaking thoroughness which surprised even Harry. The old man enjoyed himself. As a reward for his assistance, and since like Little Doom he was small, they permitted him to be the victim in their reconstruction. Mr. Campion sat in the grass and watched the pantomime, while the constable skulked in the background.

“That's it, then,” South announced as he helped Old
Harry up out of the ditch for the eleventh time. “The victim followed the murderer on to the bridge, advancing from the meadow. The murderer climbed first and then, looking about for a weapon, caught sight of the ploughshare ready to hand. He snatched it up and, stepping back on to the stile, struck the victim one tremendous blow which sent him reeling against that low rail, so that he fell over down into the greenery below. The murderer next threw the weapon away and it fell under that tree, which is just where it would fall. If the ploughshare fits the wound, we've got it. How's that?”

Charlie Luke, who was hot and dusty, leant back against the stile and felt for a cigarette.

“And what did the bloke do next? Continue down to the village for a quick one, taking his steam hammer with him?” He frowned and went on talking, the physical power of the man apparent in the very tones of his voice, which set the leaves vibrating. “I've not examined this wound, as you know, but I've not lived a sheltered life. I've seen a few head injuries. What does this relic of the iron age weigh? Three to four pounds at most. One blow from it to kill a normal man stone dead? I don't believe it. I don't believe one man in a million could deliver such a blow, even from above with the wind behind him. Come to that, I don't believe I could do it myself.” Seizing an imaginary Little Doom by the throat, he whirled his arm over his head and brought it down upon his closed left fist. “Solid reinforced rubber, human skulls,” he said.

Superintendent Fred South did not speak for a moment. His colour had heightened and a gleam, which was apprehensive rather than mocking, had appeared in his twinkling eyes. At length he made a soft, tooth-sucking sound of decision.

“Constable, you can go and collect my chaps and tell them to bring both cars round to the village end of this path,” he commanded. “Are you going with him, Mr. Buller?”

“No, I ain't going walkin' with he for a while.” Old
Harry made a long and ruminative noise of the pronouncement. “And I'm a-goin' up to The Gauntlett to get myself a pint, and I'm a gointoputatdowntoyou.”

The final words were so run together that since there was no constable to translate they were unintelligible. He touched his cap and stumped off, smiling, his lashes lying modestly on his rosy cheeks.

Luke dug in his trousers pockets but Campion shook his head.

“I think you'll find all that has been mysteriously laid on,” he murmured. “My crystal tells me that Old Harry has joined your service. You'll be seeing him again. What is it, Superintendent? Something worrying you?”

“It ought to.” The man in the tight tweeds sat down on the rail of the bridge and took out a pipe. “It's been enough trouble to me all my life.” He cast a sly upward glance at Luke. “The long and the short of it is that I can't bring myself to trust a man until I've worked with him for a bit. It's what you might call a kink in my nature. It affects my memory at times.” He paused, hopefully, but there was an ominous silence, broken only by the rustle of the grasses and the murmur of the bees in the clover. “Of course,” he went on, scratching his ear and grimacing, “a trait like that can be remarkably bad for me. For instance, when a smart young man who, as I can see now, will go far, is sent down by the Central Office—”

“Oh all right, I'll buy it.” Luke spoke with sufficient suppressed ferocity to preclude any promise of weakness. “What have you been holding out on me? The P.M. report?”

“Not the report, son. I'm not barmy if I'm butter-fingered.” South was laughing again, but warily. “It hadn't come in when we left, but it'll be waiting for us now. But I did happen to have a word with the County Pathologist on the telephone. You'll see it all in black and white in a minute. But as far as I could understand from what he told me, our corpse wasn't very normal, not in the skull.”

“Oh Lord.” Luke spoke, but both listeners had stiffened abruptly at the intelligence. “Not one of these darned thin-skulled cases?”

South began to nod like a mandarin, winking and flashing and conveying unspoken secrets through every pore.

“The thinnest he has ever seen. Equal to the thinnest ever recorded. One forty-seventh of an inch. He said it was only one blow, struck by an iron bar approximately three-quarters of an inch wide, which is about right for the bevel edge of the cray of the ploughshare, and it had about the same effect as a kid hitting an egg with the back of a knife.” He started his teetering giggle again, but smothered it. “So you see,” he said, “any blessed soul could have done it. Ladies as well, if they were cross enough.”

CHARLIE LUKE HAD
had little sleep, and now that noon was past, three o'clock came nearer and nearer, so that his private worries obtruded into his thoughts, suffocating him with sick apprehension. The case looked as sticky as any he had ever known, and his chances of finding himself Local Enemy No. 1 seemed more than high.

Mr. Campion was on edge, which was unlike him, and the lush fairyland in which Luke found himself like a cockney on an outing was strange and even alarming in its little surprises. For instance, he had just discovered that the excellent pie which he had enjoyed was made largely of peacocks. The comfortable elderly party who said she was the daughter of the old landlord had just told him so when she came in to apologise for having to serve them in the little back room, since the large front one was crowded. She brought them each a tail feather tip to put in their coats for luck.

“Wear them, and the pie won't repeat,” she said cheerfully, placing a plate of processed cheese, five dry biscuits and some margarine before them. “Or would you like a junket?”

“This,” said Luke firmly, seizing the cheese, which he detested but at least had eaten before. “Do you—er—eat a lot of peacocks round here?”

“Oh no.” She seemed scandalised. “They're a very rare bird. Old Admiral Bear from Bandy Hall at Girdle has his roast peacock club dinner here every twentieth of June. He's done it for years and years, and his father before him. He breeds the birds and we cook them. Then on Midsummer Eve we make the pies out of the giblets and the
left-overs, and that way every customer gets a taste. That's why the house is so full today. Oh, there's a lot goes on at Pontisbright. I made sure young Amanda had told you.”

“My wife's at The Beckoning Lady,” volunteered Mr. Campion.

“Ah yes, with poor Miss Minnie.” She lowered her eyes, as at the mention of a family embarrassment. “Horrid little person,” she said. “Fancy going down there to get done in. Cheek, eh?”

A shout from the other room sent her hurrying to answer it and they were left alone.

“I didn't notice anything peculiar about the pie, did you?” Mr. Campion was not really thinking what he was saying. “I didn't notice it. Like Lady Macbeth, it should have died hereafter.”

He was hunting beside him as he spoke and Luke produced a wilted bundle from the floor at his feet.

“Here are your flowers, if that's what you want,” he suggested.

“Oh thank you.” Campion, who had called in at the Mill for them on his way to The Gauntlett, took the herbs with relief and spread them out on the table. “Snap-dragon, that's all right. But this thing ought to be Wild Liquorice, which is beyond me.”

“That's Mint,” said Luke, dragging his mind from his own troubles.

“I know.” Campion took a piece of stamp-paper from his wallet, affixed it neatly to the woody stem, and wrote “Liquorice (Wild)” on it in small printing. “Then there's Meadow Saffron,” he said, “which is out of season, so the tiresome chap must have the bulb, and good luck to him. And a sprig of elder, which has to be tied to it. Finally there's this handsome bloom, the best of the lot.”

“Petunia?”

“Exactly. I wonder if I could bother you, my dear chap, to take these into the next room for me. Somewhere there you will see a man who looks like Little Doom.”

“What?”

“I have it on my son's authority. He's probably quite different, but will certainly be a clerkly type, wearing a raincoat—or perhaps not at his meal. Anyway, I think you'll spot him as well as I should, and if you'd just go over to him and say ‘The Mole Insurance Company?', and then, when he admits it, ‘The roots for Mr. Whippet', you will be doing me an eternal service.”

“Yes, I'll go.” Luke got up, his dark shiny eyes very curious. “Snap-dragon means ‘No'.”

“That's perfectly correct.” Mr. Campion was temporarily jaunty. “You and I have no secrets, Charles, I hope? Snap-dragon, ‘No'. Wild liquorice, ‘I declare against you'. Meadow Saffron, ‘beware of excess' coupled with Elder, ‘zeal'. And Petunia, ‘keep your promise'. I ought to have added a red red rose.”

“Which means ‘love'?”

“How true. It's a very laborious method of correspondence but it has its uses.”

“‘No. I declare against you. Beware of excess zeal. Keep your promise. Love,'” said Luke. “That's a funny message to an insurance company.”

“Well,
is
it?” asked Mr. Campion. He was drinking very bad coffee when the Chief Inspector returned looking slightly dazed.

“I found him,” he announced with frank bewilderment. “Wizened little chap. He took them without batting an eyelid. Said ‘Ow, thank you very much'. I say, there are about forty people in that room, Campion, all eating peacock pie because it's Midsummer's Eve. I could do with some coffee.”

“So could I,” said Mr. Campion with feeling, “but don't despair. She's coming back with some of the Admiral's other left-overs. She says it's Napoleon and you never know.”

The comfortable landlady brought two thimble-glasses, frighteningly overfilled, and withdrew. Whatever it was, it was wonderful.

“Napoleon?” said Luke after the first sip. “Alexander! That's better. My feet are touching the ground again. Campion, I don't want to interfere but should I offend you if I asked you in confidence what the Mole has promised or to whom?”

Mr. Campion sat looking at his little glass.

“You wouldn't offend me, my dear chap,” he said, “but you'd embarrass me. I haven't the faintest idea. Moreover,” he continued earnestly, “I just don't see at all how there can be a claim on them—that is, of course, if they and myself are talking about the same corpse. However, that's their look-out.”

Luke was uneasy. Mr. Campion's strange world of nods and hints and mysterious understandings among people who trusted each other because they were or were not related, or had been to school or served in a ship or a regiment together, both bothered and fascinated him. His own plate was embarrassingly full, but he was still inquisitive.

“The corpse you have in mind is the old gentleman's, isn't it? Mr. William Faraday, your old chum?”

“Yes.”

“Anything funny about that death?”

“The reverse.” Mr. Campion sounded bitter. “He was one of the best old boys in the world. He was dying, and he wanted to live until Bonfire Night. And he wasn't allowed to make it.”

“Not allowed? What do you mean?”

The thin man put his hand in his pocket and took out a telegraph form. It had awaited him at the Mill and he had picked it up when he collected the flowers. Now he re-read it and threw it across to Luke.

“Supposition confirmed. Pritchard.”

Luke blinked. “The analyst?”

“Yes. I sent him a couple of the pellets which were on Uncle William's mantelshelf. I said I thought they might be dormital, and if they were would he let me know.”

“Dormital?” Luke was frowning. “We've had a crop of
suicides with that lately. Take it with al—I say, Campion! Your old friend believed in alcohol, didn't he?”

“He was never without it.” Mr. Campion spoke with misleading lightness. “He said it would be the death of him and it was. He thought he was taking pluminol. They look very alike, and the dormital was planted in his normal box. He washed it down with what Minnie considered a decent nightcap for a drinking man—the equivalent to four stiff ones, I should think.”

“But Campion—” Luke was sitting bolt upright, “—that's murder.”

Mr. Campion remained lounging indolently in his chair, one arm over its back, the other elbow on the table.

“Prove it,” he suggested.

Luke was frowning, all his shepherd dog instincts aroused.

“I'll have a damned good try.”

“No.” Mr. Campion did not smile. “Impossible. Consider it. Suppose you have him up, what will you find? A liver like a breadboard, possibly a trace of the stuff left—it deteriorates very quickly—a body which was worn out anyway and was only kept going by will-power and affectionate nursing. No, you'd be wasting your time. The stuff isn't even a poison. A lot of people take it habitually—people who don't drink, of course.”

“Who benefits?”

The first question asked in any case of unnatural death by any good policeman escaped Luke involuntarily.

“No one whom I can find. Minnie loses money. William gave her the bulk of his possessions four and a half years ago, and she let Little Doom know. Little Doom filed the information and with his natural bossiness insisted on a formal Deed of Gift, although it was nothing to do with him. Since the old boy did not live the statutory five years from the date of signing, this estate is still considered his for the purpose of Death Duties. She'll have to pay. I should think it would be an embarrassment to her. There simply isn't anybody else. He was very much loved, he
was looked after like a baby, everyone was sorry when he died.”