Читать книгу Dancers in Mourning - Margery Allingham - Страница 6

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There are moments of acute sensation before the mind gets to work again when shock is no more than a feeling of physical chill, and at these times the details of one’s surroundings are apt to take on a peculiar vividness.

Linda became aware of the untidiness of the brightly lit room, of Chloe’s red handkerchief folded neatly on the piano with her book upon it, and of Campion’s long, dark, suddenly important back as he stood arrested, half turned towards her husband.

Then there were footsteps in the hall behind her and Sutane’s manager, Dick Poyser, his sad eyes inquisitive, came in.

“I heard a noise,” he said. “What’s the matter, Jimmy?”

Sutane stepped into the room. He was a little unsteady on his feet.

“I’ve killed Chloe ... she chucked herself under the car.”

“For God’s sake, shut up!” Poyser looked round him involuntarily and his thought was as evident as if he had spoken it. “Where is she?” he went on, adding instantly: “Anyone see you?”

“No. I was alone.” Sutane shook his head as he spoke, his naïveté almost childlike beside the other man’s authority. “She’s down in the lane on the grass. I put her there. I didn’t like to leave her in the road. The car’s there, too, because of the lights. I couldn’t leave her in the dark. I cut across the park.”

“Sure she’s dead?” Poyser was staring at him in horrified fascination.

“Oh, yes.” The light pleasant voice was dull. “The wheels went clean over her. It’s a heavy car. What the hell shall we do?”

There were other movements in the house now and Mercer’s voice, lazy and inarticulate as usual, sounded from the little music room across the hall. Uncle William’s characteristic rumble answered him. Poyser turned sharply to Campion.

“Are you something to do with the police?”

“No.” Campion glanced down at him curiously.

“Thank God for that!” His relief was heartfelt. “We’ll go down. Where did it happen, Jimmy? Give him a drink, Linda. Pull yourself together, old boy. Steady now, steady.”

“I should phone for a doctor and the police at once.” Mr. Campion’s quiet impersonal voice cut into the conversation.

“Why the police?” Poyser pounced on the word suspiciously.

“Because there’s been an accident. It’s the rule of the road, to start with.”

“Oh, I see ...” The little man looked up, a faint smile which was both knowing and appreciative twisting his mouth. “Yes, of course. I forgot that. Linda, that’s a job for you. Give us three minutes to get down there and then phone. First a doctor, then the police. Just be perfectly natural. There’s been an accident and someone’s hurt. Got that? Good. Now we’ll go. Jimmy, you’ll have to come, old chap.”

Just before he went out after the others Campion glanced back at the girl. She was still standing halfway across the room. Her hand covered her mouth and her eyes were round and frightened. He realised suddenly that throughout the whole scene she had said nothing at all.

As soon as the three hurrying men stepped out into the darkness they saw the pale haze of headlights above the trees in the lane. Sutane was talking. He was excited, but his extreme nerviness of earlier in the day had gone. Campion received the impression that he was watching his words as carefully as he could.

“I told her not to come here at all,” he said as they strode over the grass. “I told her frankly I didn’t want her here. But she insisted, you know she did. This must have been in her mind all the time. What an incredible trick! On my place! Under my car!”

“Be quiet.” Campion caught the gleam of Poyser’s little black eyes as they flickered towards him. “Be quiet, old boy. We’ll see what happened when we get there.”

They hurried on in silence for a little while. Sutane was breathing heavily.

“I was blinding, you know,” he said suddenly. “Didn’t see her until I was over her.”

Poyser took his arm. “Forget it,” he said softly. “We’ll get it straight in a minute or so. How do we get through this hedge?”

“There’s a gap somewhere. I climbed the bank and forced my way through. It’s only laurels.”

They came slithering down the high bank to the road, bringing great clods of sandy yellow earth with them. The car stood in the middle of the lane, her engine still running, while behind, ghastly in the faint red glare of the taillight, was something white and quiet on the grass verge. Poyser tiptoed forward, oblivious of the absurdity of his caution. He bent down and struck a match. He stood holding it in the still, warm air until it burned his fingers.

“Lumme,” he said softly at last, and the old-fashioned expletive was more forceful than any other he could have used.

As Campion and Sutane came up he swung away from the body and took the actor’s sleeve.

“Where was she when you hit her?”

Campion left them. He had a pencil torch in his pocket and now knelt down beside the dead woman with it. Chloe Pye was still in her white swimming suit. She lay on her back on the verge, her head dangling over the grass-grown ditch and her thin body limp and shapeless. The near-side wheels of the car had passed over her chest, crushing her rib cage. There was dirt and considerable laceration of the skin, but very little blood. Her hand was cool when he touched it, but not clammy.

Mr. Campion sat back on his heels. In the darkness his face was blank. Poyser’s voice recalled him.

“Have you got a flash lamp there? Bring it here a moment.”

Campion rose and went over. The skid marks were easily discernible on the flint road. By the light of the little torch they found the spot where Sutane had jammed on his brakes, and a little farther on the dreadful smother of stones and dust with the pitifully small stain in it where the woman had fallen. Sutane’s teeth were chattering.

“She just dropped in front of me,” he said. “I didn’t see her till she flashed past the windscreen. She chucked herself under the car. I didn’t know what had happened until I came back to see what I’d hit.”

“It was an accident.” Poyser’s voice was pleading. “A pure accident, old boy. Where was she standing?”

“Don’t be a fool. She did it deliberately.” Sutane’s voice was exasperated. “That’s where she came from.” He snatched the torch and sent its beam flickering upward.

Poyser swore because the unexpected sight startled him.

“The bridge ...” he said, staring up at the rose-hung arch. “Good God, didn’t you see her fall?”

“No, I keep telling you.” Sutane sounded sulky. “I was blinding. Naturally I was looking at the road, not up in the air somewhere.”

“All the same, I should have thought the headlights would have caught her,” the other man insisted, still staring up at the leafy span above him.

In the faint light from the torch Campion saw his small face alive with worry and invention.

“That’s it,” he said abruptly. “That’s what happened. I see it now. That’s what happened, Jimmy. She saw you coming and waved to you to stop. Probably she leant right over, imagining she was a fairy or a bumblebee or something—it’s the sort of crazy idea she might have—and somehow or other she overbalanced and fell under your wheels before you could stop. That’s what happened. It’d make it much more simple if you’d seen her do it. You must have seen her up there.”

“But I didn’t, I tell you.” Sutane was obstinate. “I was blinding with my eyes on the road and my mind on those damned invitations. Suddenly something plumped down just in front of me and I slammed on the brakes. There was a sort of jolt and I pulled up when I could and backed the bus down the road. Then I got out and went round to the back of the car and there she was.”

“Jimmy”—Poyser’s voice was wheedling—“it must have been an accident. Think of it, my dear chap, think of the situation. It must have been an accident. Chloe wouldn’t kill herself. Why should she? She was making a comeback in your show. She was a visitor in your house. She wouldn’t deliberately chuck herself under your car. That’s the kind of story newspapermen dream about when they’re half tight. She was trying to attract your attention and fell over. That’s the obvious truth as I see it, and believe me it’s bad enough.”

Sutane was silent. The vibrations of Poyser’s arguments still hung about in the darkness. He shuddered.

“It may have been so,” he said with an unsuccessful attempt at conviction. “But I didn’t see her, Dick. On my oath, I did not see her.”

“All right. But it was an accident. Do understand that.”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Mr. Campion asked if he might have his torch back, explaining that he wished to examine the bridge.

“Good idea.” There was an element of conspiracy in the way Poyser thrust the pencil into his hand, and it occurred to Campion that the tactics of businessmen were elephantine capers. He hoped devoutly that the affair would remain a country one and that the astute Mr. Poyser would never be confronted by a metropolitan detective.

He scrambled up the bank again and, forcing his way through the shrubs, found the path without much difficulty. The bridge itself was a much more solid structure than it had appeared from the road. The parapets, although constructed of “rustic” work, were astonishingly steady and were further reinforced by a tangle of American Pillar and wild white convolvulus. The bright red roses looked unreal and somehow Victorian in the artificial light of the torch as Campion examined the hedge of flowers carefully, his discomfort increasing. The creosoted boards beneath his feet told him nothing. The dry summer had left them smooth and barely even dusty.

He worked over the ground with hurried inquisitiveness and at every step his uneasiness grew. Yet it was not his discoveries which so disturbed him. Poyser’s voice, carefully lowered to an inarticulate murmur, floated up to him with the scent of the flowers in the warm, soft air. Now and again Sutane answered, his voice clear and irritable.

“It would be like her,” Campion heard him admit.

And again, after a prolonged muttering from Poyser:

“Yes, she liked secrets.”

At this point another beam of light swung down the lane and came racing towards them. Campion hurried off the bridge and plunged back through the laurels. In view of everything, he was anxious to be present when the police arrived.

He came out through the bushes and slid into the road just as a car came to a standstill within a few feet of him so abruptly that the engine stopped. He saw it was a large Fiat, a few years old, a portly vehicle. The near-side window came down with a rattle and an old voice, slow with the affectations of the educated seventies, the father, as it were, of Uncle William’s voice, said sternly:

“My name’s Bouverie. Somebody telephoned to my house to tell me that someone was hurt.”

“Doctor Bouverie?”

“Yes.” The curtness of the monosyllable suggested that the speaker was irritated at finding himself unknown. “Get that car out of the way. You’ve taken the patient up to the house, I suppose.”

“No. No, we haven’t. She’s here.” It was Sutane who interrupted. He had hurried forward and now adopted unconsciously the tone of nervous authority which he kept for such of those strangers whom he did not instantly set out to charm.

“Are you Mr. Sutane?”

The voice in the car had authority also, and of the magisterial variety.

“I think I met you at your house this afternoon. Were you driving the car?”

Sutane was momentarily taken off his balance.

“Yes,” he said. “Er, yes, I was.”

“Ah!”

The door opened.

“Well, I’ll take a look at your victim, don’t you know.”

Campion never forgot his first glimpse of the figure who climbed slowly out of the darkness of the car into the tiny circle of light from the torch. His first impression was of enormous girth in a white lounge suit. Then he saw an old pugnacious face with drooping chaps and a wise eye peering out from under the peak of a large tweed cap. Its whole expression was arrogant, honest, and startlingly reminiscent of a bulldog, with perhaps a dash of bloodhound. He was clean-shaven except for a minute white tuft on his upper lip, but his plump, short-fingered surgeon’s hands had hair on the backs of them.

A Georgian tough, thought Campion, startled, and never had occasion to alter his opinion.

He had not seen the doctor at the disastrous party of the afternoon and rightly supposed that he had been one of the many who had come late only to leave almost immediately afterwards.

Sutane remembered him, so much was obvious. His face wore that indignant, contemptuous expression which is always more than half embarrassment.

Poyser, who saw trouble brewing, came forward ingratiatingly.

“It was a pure accident,” he volunteered, attempting to be matter-of-fact and succeeding in sounding casual.

“Oh!” The newcomer raised his head and stared at him. “Were you in the car?”

“No, I wasn’t. Mr. Sutane was alone. Mr. Campion and I have just come down from the house. We——”

“Quite. Where is the patient? It’s a woman, you say? Where is she?”

Dr. Bouverie had brushed past the discomfited Poyser and addressed Sutane. His whole manner was truculent and highhanded to an extent which would have been ridiculous or merely rude had it not so obviously sprung from a lifetime of authority. As it was, he was frankly awe-inspiring, and Mr. Campion, who knew the signs, felt his heart sink.

The doctor produced an eighteen-inch torch from his enormous coat pocket and gave it to Sutane to hold.

“In the back of the car, I suppose,” he said, advancing upon the Bentley.

“No, she’s here.” Sutane swung the beam of light onto the verge with a suddenness unconsciously dramatic, and the newcomer, who was growing more like the spirit of rural justice incarnate at every step, paused in his tracks like a startled grizzly. He made a little teetering sound with his tongue, expressing astonishment and, it would seem, disgust.

“Come closer, will you?” he said. “I want the light actually on her. That’s a little better. If you can’t keep it steady one of the others must hold it.”

Poyser took the torch and the old doctor knelt down on the grass, having first assured himself that it was not damp. His whole poise suggested extreme distaste and disapproval, but his square hands were exquisitely gentle.

After a while he got up, disdaining Sutane’s assistance.

“She’s dead,” he said. “You knew that, of course? What was she doing running about naked?”

He pronounced it “nekkit” and the affectation gave the word an odd shamefulness.

“She used to do that,” said Sutane wearily. “She’s worn a bathing dress all day. What on earth does it matter?”

The old eyes under the peaked cap stared at him as at a curiosity and Poyser interrupted again. He insisted on giving his version of the affair, investing it, in his extreme anxiety to be both lucid and convincing, with a glibness which sounded positively inhuman.

The monstrous old man listened to him until the end, his head slightly on one side. It was a hopeless encounter, Mr. Campion reflected; like a clever fish trying to talk to an equally clever dog, an experiment predestined to end in mutual distrust.

Dr. Bouverie directed his torch at the bridge.

“But if she fell off there by accident, don’t you know, she must have climbed out over those roses—an extraordinary thing to do so lightly clad. Ah, here comes the man we want. Is that you, Doe?”

“Yes, sir. Good evening, sir.” A police constable, young and remarkably handsome in the uniform which seems to vary between the impressive and the comic, solely according to its wearer’s face, swung himself off his bicycle and laid the machine carefully against the bank. The doctor advanced upon him.

“There’s been a shocking accident,” he said, sounding like an army colonel addressing a favoured subordinate. “The woman either fell or threw herself off the bridge here under Mr. Sutane’s car. This is Mr. Sutane. The woman is dead. I shall want the body taken down to Birley and I’ll ring up the coroner first thing tomorrow morning and probably do a post-mortem a little later.”

“Yes, sir.”

The doctor had not finished.

“Meanwhile,” he said, “I should like to take a look at that bridge. How d’you get up to it, Mr. Sutane?”

“I climbed up the bank, but there’s a gate a little farther along.” Sutane’s utter weariness was pathetic.

“Then I’ll use it. Perhaps you’d be good enough to direct me.” The old doctor was brusque and bursting with energy. “Doe, throw a rug over that poor woman and then come along.”

Mr. Campion did not join the party. As was his custom when his immediate presence was not necessary, he succeeded in effacing himself. As soon as the policeman’s steady steps disappeared down the lane he wandered over to the Fiat and looked inside. The back of the car contained a bag, a folded rug and a wedge-shaped wooden box fitted with small flower containers in little sockets arranged in neat equidistant rows. The rest of the interior told him nothing and with infinite caution he raised the bonnet.

Sutane was the first to return. Campion was standing aimlessly by the Bentley when he came up. Overhead on the bridge there was the murmur of voices. Sutane was trembling with fury.

“Surely that fellow’s exceeding his job?” he began in a whisper. “The bobby treats him as though he was God Almighty. What’s it matter to him if she committed suicide or not? Blithering old ass!—he’s about ninety.”

“Then he probably is omnipotent in this district.” Campion lowered his voice discreetly. “A personality like that would make an impression anywhere, given time. Look out; he’s probably on the Bench.”

Sutane wiped his forehead. In the glare of the headlights he looked like one of his own photographs outside the theatre, a fantastic figure caught for an instant in a nightmare world of towering shadows.

“This is the last straw,” he said. “It’s got to be an accident, Campion. I see that now. Poyser’s right. For all our sakes it’s got to be an accident. Good God! What did she want to do it for?—and why here?”

“What’s happened?” Sock came slithering down the bank behind them, a tousled scarecrow in the uncertain light. “Linda told me something frightful—I couldn’t believe it. Jimmy, my dear old chap, what’s up?”

They told him and he stood looking down at the rug-covered mound, his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets.

“Oh, Lord,” he said, something like tears in his voice. “Oh, Lord.”

Campion touched him on the shoulder and, leading him a little to one side, made a request.

“The old boy’s going to be nasty, I’m afraid,” he finished. “He came to the party this afternoon and didn’t understand it. I’d go myself, of course, but I want to be here when he comes back.”

“My dear chap, anything I can do.” Sock’s voice was still tremulous. Like many intensely virile men, he was bowled over by emotion of any sort. “I’ll be back in a moment. Delighted to be able to do anything I can. I’ll tell the others to stay up there, shall I? After all, they can’t do much.”

He went off, clambering up the bank again, and footsteps down the lane announced the return of the others. Dr. Bouverie was still in charge.

“Unless she was actually standing on the parapet, a thing no woman in her senses would do, surely, I don’t see how she managed to fall.” The old voice, which was yet so powerful, made the statement for his companions’ information. He implied no doubt whatever: he simply did not see how she managed to fall.

“Oh, but she might easily have done that, Doctor. I knew her. She did that sort of thing.” Poyser’s soothing tone was wearing thin.

“Was she unbalanced? Her costume, or lack of it, does suggest that.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. She was impulsive—temperamental. She might easily have climbed up there to wave to Sutane.”

“Indeed.” Dr. Bouverie was not impressed. He turned to the constable. “Well, I’ve finished, Doe. You know what to do. Treat it just like an ordinary accident. You can get some sort of conveyance probably. I shall be at Birley about ten tomorrow morning. Probably Doctor Dean will be with me. Good night, gentlemen.”

He climbed into the car and pressed the starter. The Fiat did not respond.

The next fifteen minutes was devoted to the car by the whole company. Any man in an obstinately stationary car seems to be a responsibility to all about him, but Dr. Bouverie in that predicament was a sacred charge. Aware, no doubt, that a god in a machine that won’t go may easily degenerate into an angry mortal, he kept his dignity and controlled his temper, but contrived, nevertheless, to appear somehow terrible in the more ancient sense of the word. The tragedy of Chloe Pye’s death faded into obscurity for a moment or so.

Sock Petrie’s arrival in Campion’s Lagonda was nicely timed. As Poyser shifted the Bentley to let the grey car pass, Campion made his graceful suggestion.

“Let me run you home, sir,” he murmured. “There’s a good man up at the house who will put this right and bring your car along.”

Dr. Bouverie wavered. His keen eyes regarded Campion inquisitively and, seeing nothing to dislike in him, he accepted with unexpected charm.

“Extremely civil of you,” he said. “It’s my own fault. I ought to have got my man up, but he’s done a hundred and twenty miles with me today, so I thought I’d let the feller sleep, don’t you know.”

As they set off down the lane at a sedate pace Campion prepared himself for a delicate campaign.

“Excellent roads,” he began cautiously. “This is my first visit to this part of the world. I noticed them at once.”

“Think so?” A trace of satisfaction in the old voice warmed his heart. “They ought to be. We had the devil of a job getting the authorities to realise that a side road is as important to the residents of a district as the main ways that cater for all these damned trippers who do their best to ruin the country. Still, we hammered it into their heads at last. You’re a stranger, you say? Were you at that gathering this afternoon?”

“Yes.” Mr. Campion sounded regretful. “A most unfortunate business. The mistake of a secretary. Dates mixed, you know.”

“Really? Oh, I see. Thought it curious myself. These Londoners don’t understand our country ways. Forgive me, I didn’t catch your name?”

Mr. Campion gave it and added that he was a Norfolk man. To his relief they discovered a mutual acquaintance and, as the old gentleman softened considerably, he took heart.

“A frightful accident,” he ventured. “Miss Pye seemed in such good spirits all day.”

“Ah, indeed. We turn to the left here if you don’t mind. How pleasant the clover smells in the dark. Notice it?”

Campion took the hint and played his best card.

“Isn’t this a great district for roses?” he enquired, remembering the wedge-shaped box in the Fiat.

His passenger brightened noticeably.

“Finest in the world. I take a little interest in roses myself.” He paused and added with an unexpected chuckle: “Twelve tickets out of fourteen at Hernchester yesterday. Five firsts for roses, and a cup. Not bad for an old ’un, eh?”

“I say, that’s extraordinarily good.” Mr. Campion was genuinely impressed. “Do you believe in bone manure?”

“Not on my soil. I’ve got a streak of the genuine clay.”

They discussed roses and their culture for several miles. Even Campion, who was used to strong contrasts, was aware of a certain nightmare quality in the drive. Dr. Bouverie talked of his hobby with knowledge and the passionate interest of a young man in his twenties. The brittle world of White Walls and the stage seemed a long way away.

By the time they pulled up in a darkened village the doctor was engrossed in his subject.

“I’ll show you those Lady Forteviots. If you’ve missed ’em you’ve missed a treat,” he said. “Here we are.”

Campion discovered that the dark wall which he had taken to be the side of a rural factory was the front of a bleak Georgian house. A Victorian porch, fastened with solid wooden doors, stuck out into the road at an angle which no modern council would dream of sanctioning.

The doctor rang the bell and bellowed “Dorothy!” at the top of his surprising voice. At the sound a lamp appeared in a window on the first floor and Campion followed its passage through what seemed to be endless galleries, the faint beams flickering through window after window until they disappeared in the darkness directly above their heads. A moment later the doors began to rattle and after a considerable delay wherein bolt after bolt was drawn they clattered open and an elderly woman appeared holding a paraffin lamp above her head. It was a Dickensian greeting. She did not smile or speak but stood back respectfully to allow them to pass. The doctor strode into the darkness beyond the circle of light and Campion followed, very conscious that it was after midnight.

The old man clapped his hands, a sultanic gesture curiously in keeping with his personality.

“Whisky and water in the dining room, and go down to the cottage and tell George I want him.”

“He’ll be in bed, sir.”

“Of course he will, if he’s a sensible feller. Tell him to put on a coat and a pair of trousers and meet me in the conservatory. I want to show this gentleman some roses.”

“Yes, sir.” She set down the lamp and went off into the darkness.

Campion demurred feebly.

“Oh, no trouble at all.” The old man sounded like a stage schoolboy out of a Victorian revival. Campion thought he had never seen anyone so gloriously happy. “We’re up at all hours of the day and night here. A doctor’s life, you know.”

He took up the lamp and Campion discovered that the thing he had been half leaning against under the impression that it was the banister head was a full-sized stuffed wolf. He glanced round him and got a fleeting impression of narrow walls covered with cases of stuffed birds.

“Do any shooting?” said his host over his shoulder. “A hundred and thirty-two heads, my own gun, walking alone last October. Not bad, eh? Ten hours of it and then the night bell till dawn. I’m seventy-nine and don’t feel it.”

He spoke boastingly but obviously without exaggeration.

They went into a small overcrowded dining room whose red-and-gold paper was almost hidden behind execrable sporting oils and yet more cases of wild fowl. The old doctor looked less extraordinary in these surroundings. He stood on the hearth rug, so much a part of his own world that it was his visitor who felt himself the oddity. His host stared at him with professional interest and Campion, who wondered what he was thinking, was suddenly enlightened.

“Can you fight?”

The younger man was surprised to find himself nettled.

“I’ll take on anyone of my weight,” he said.

“Ha! Go through the war?”

“Only the last six months. I was born in nineteen hundred.”

“Good!” The last word was spoken with tremendous emphasis, and there was a pause. Dr. Bouverie looked sad. “I was considered old even then,” he said regretfully.

The woman returned with the decanter and glasses.

“George is waiting, sir.”

“Very well. You can go to bed now.”

“Yes, sir.” There was no expression at all in her voice.

Campion sipped his drink and thought of Chloe Pye, Sutane and the newspapers. He supposed he had driven the old man five miles at the most. It seemed a little space to separate such different worlds.

“Now these roses”—the doctor set down his glass—“they’re extraordinary. There’s not a rose to touch ’em for exhibition, unless it’s the old Frau Karl Druschki. They’ve got the body. That’s the important thing in an exhibition rose—body.”

He led his guest through a drawing room which was chilly in spite of the heat of the night and appeared from the fleeting glimpse Campion got of it to be literally in rags.

The conservatory was a magnificent sight, however. It was overcrowded but the show of begonias and gloxinias was astonishing. A tall thin depressed figure in a felt hat and a raincoat awaited them with a hurricane lantern.

“Ready, George?” the doctor sounded as if he were going into battle.

“Yes, sir.”

They came out into a dark garden which felt and smelled like a paradise but which was, unfortunately, completely invisible. The roses were found, golden-yellow blossoms fading into apricot on long, carefully disbudded stems. Little white canvas hoods on stakes protected them from the weather.

The two old men, the doctor and the gardener, pored over them like mothers. Their enthusiasm was both tender and devout. The doctor put his blunt fingers under a blossom and tilted it gently.

“Isn’t she lovely?” he said softly. “Good night, my little dear.”

He rearranged the canvas hat.

“You won’t see a better rose than that in the county,” he boasted.

As they walked back to the dark house Campion took his courage in his hands.

“I suppose it was hitting her head on the road that really killed that woman?” he said.

“Yes, the skull was fractured. You noticed that, did you?” The old doctor sounded pleased. “What I don’t see is how she came to fall, don’t you know, unless she threw herself over. That’s a matter which must be cleared up, because of the inquest. I—ah—I didn’t notice any reek of alcohol.”

“No, she wasn’t drunk,” said Campion slowly. “Not technically.”

To his surprise the old man followed his thought.

“Hysterical type?” he enquired.

Campion saw his chance. “There’s not a great deal of difference between hysteria and what is usually called temperament, don’t you think?” he said.

The old man was silent. He was considering.

“I haven’t had much experience of temperament,” he said at last, admitting it as though it were a fault. “I attended an opera singer once, close on fifty years ago. She was insane. I didn’t like that bathing dress this evening. Had she been walking about like that all day? We’re forty miles from the sea.”

Campion launched into a careful explanation. He did his best to convey Chloe Pye in elementary terms. She was vain, he said; hard-working, physically active, and anxious to appear younger than she was.

“So you see,” he finished, “she might easily have climbed the parapet and waved to Sutane, who was looking at the road and did not see her.”

“Yes.” The old man sounded interested. “Yes. I see that. But if she was sufficiently active to get up there, and was, as you say, practically an acrobat, why should she have fallen?”

It was a reasonable argument but without inspiration. Campion felt sure he must be on the Bench.

“Something may have frightened her,” he said lamely. “Her foot may have slipped on the crushed stems.”

“But there were no crushed stems,” said Dr. Bouverie. “I looked for them. Still, I thank you for your information. The woman isn’t so incomprehensible to me now. I shall go over her carefully in the morning. I may find something to account for sudden faintness, or something like that. It’s been extremely civil of you. Come and see my roses in the daylight.”

He conducted his guest to the door and Campion, stumbling against something in the dark, felt a warm muzzle in his hand. The dog had made no sound from the beginning and he realised suddenly that the two servants had been the same—silent, utterly obedient, and yet friendly and content.

His host stood on the porch, the lamp raised.

“Good night!” he shouted. “Good night!”

Campion drove slowly back to White Walls. The clouds had shifted and the starlight shed a faint radiance on the wide flat fields about him. It was eerily quiet and very much the country. He felt he was travelling back a hundred years.

In the lane he found the doctor’s car parked at the side to await the chauffeur’s ministrations in the early morning. He drew up and, getting out, raised the bonnet of the Fiat. He found the main lead from the distributor to the coil and connected it again. When he touched the starter the engine turned over obediently.

He got back into the Lagonda and went on. As he saw the graceful white house rising up against the sky he hesitated for a moment, half inclined to turn back and make for London.

A few hours before he had fully intended to pass quietly out of the lives of the two Sutanes as speedily as possible. He never remembered feeling such curious mental alarm and the experience had not been pleasant. Now, however, a situation had arisen which made his presence necessary, a situation wherein to leave was to run away from something more concrete, and therefore less terrible but more important, than his own emotions.

Mr. Campion was not a medical man, but his experience of violent death was considerable. Dr. Bouverie, he knew, had seen many car accidents in the last twenty years, so many that he was used to them, and that therefore there was a real chance that a certain vital and obvious fact might escape him.

What Campion had noticed when he had first bent over the body of Chloe Pye, and what he had taken great pains to assure himself had so far escaped the doctor, was the remarkable absence of blood in the road.

Since blood does not circulate once the heart which pumps it has stopped, it seemed to Mr. Campion that there were a hundred chances to one that Chloe Pye had been dead for something under fifteen minutes when her body had left the bridge. In that case, of course, she had neither fallen nor jumped from it.

As he drove into the yard he wondered how she had been killed and who had thrown her under the Bentley. He also wondered if she had deserved to die.

What it did not occur to him to consider was his own unprecedented behaviour in the matter.