Читать книгу Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 7: Off With His Head, Singing in the Shrouds, False Scent - Ngaio Marsh, Stella Duffy - Страница 34

When afternoon closing-time came, Trixie pulled down the bar shutters and locked them. Simon Begg went into the Private. There was a telephone in the passage outside the Private and he had put a call through to his bookmaker. He wanted, if he could, to get the results of the 1.30 at Sandown. Teutonic Dancer was a rank outsider. He’d backed it both ways for a great deal more than he could afford to lose and had already begun to feel that if he did lose, it would be in some vague way Mrs Bünz’s fault. This was both ungracious and illogical.

For many reasons, Mrs Bünz was the last person he wanted to see and for an equal number of contradictory ones she was the first. And there she was, the picture of uncertainty and alarm, huddled, snuffling, over the parlour fire with her dreadful cold and her eternal notebooks.

She had bought a car from Simon, she might be his inspiration in a smashing win. One way and another, they had done business together. He produced a wan echo of his usual manner.

‘Hallo –’llo! And how’s Mrs B today?’ asked Simon.

‘Unwell. I have caught a severe cold in the head. Also, I have received a great shawk. Last night in the pawk was a terrible, terrible shawk.’

‘You can say that again,’ he agreed glumly, and applied himself to the Sporting News.

Suddenly they both said together: ‘As a matter of fact –’ and stopped, astonished and disconcerted.

‘Ladies first,’ said Simon.

‘Thank you. I was about to say that, as a matter of fact, I would suggest that our little transaction – ach! How shall I say it? Should remain, perhaps –‘

‘Confidential?’ he ventured eagerly.

‘That is the word for which I sought. Confidential.’

‘I’m all for it, Mrs B. I was going to make the same suggestion myself. Suits me.’

‘I am immensely relieved. Immensely. I thank you, Wing-Commander. I trust, at the same time – you do not think – it would be so shawkink – if –’

‘Eh?’ He looked up from his paper to stare at her. ‘What’s that? No, no, no, Mrs B. Not to worry. Not a chance. The idea’s laughable.’

‘To me it is not amusink but I am glad you find it so,’ Mrs Bünz said stuffily. ‘You read something of interest, perhaps, in your newspaper?’

‘I’m waiting. Teutonic Dancer. Get me? The 1.30?’

Mrs Bünz shuddered.

‘Oh, well!’ he said. ‘There you are. I follow the form as a general thing. Don’t go much for gimmicks. Still! Talk about a coincidence! You couldn’t go past it really, could you?’ He raised an admonitory finger. The telephone had begun to ring in the passage. ‘My call,’ he said. ‘This is it. Keep your fingers crossed, Mrs B.’

He darted out of the room.

Mrs Bünz, left alone, breathed uncomfortably through her mouth, blew her nose and clocked her tongue against her palate. ‘Dar,’ she breathed.

Fox came down the passage past Simon, who was saying: ‘Hold the line, please, miss, for Pete’s sake. Hold the line,’ and entered the parlour.

‘Mrs Burns?’ he asked.

Mrs Bünz, though she eyed him with evident misgivings, rallied sufficiently to correct him: ‘Eü, eü, eü,’ she demonstrated windingly through her cold. ‘Bünz.’

‘Now, that’s very interesting,’ Fox said, beaming at her. ‘That’s a noise, if you will excuse me referring to it as such, that we don’t make use of in English, do we? Would it be the same, now, as the sound in the French “eu”?’ He arranged his sedate mouth in an agonized pout. ‘Deux diseuses,’ said Mr Fox by way of illustration. ‘Not that I got beyond a very rough approximation, I’m afraid.’

‘It is not the same at all. “Bünz.”’

‘Bünz,’ mouthed Mr Fox.

‘Your accent is not perfect.’

‘I know that,’ he agreed heavily. ‘In the meantime, I’m forgetting my job. Mr Alleyn presents his compliments and wonders if you’d be kind enough to give him a few minutes.’

‘Ach! I too am forgetting. You are the police.’

‘You wouldn’t think so, the way I’m running on, would you?’

(Alleyn had said: ‘If she was an anti-Nazi refugee, she’ll think we’re ruthless automatons. Jolly her along a bit.’)

Mrs Bünz gathered herself together and followed Fox. In the passage, Simon Begg was saying: ‘Look, old boy, all I’m asking for is the gen on the 1.30. Look, old boy –’

Fox opened the door of the sitting-room and announced her.

‘Mrs Bünz,’ he said quite successfully.

As she advanced into the room Alleyn seemed to see, not so much a middle-aged German, as the generalization of a species. Mrs Bünz was the lady who sits near the front of lectures and always asks questions. She has an enthusiasm for obscure musicians, stands nearest to guides, keeps handicraft shops of the better class and reads Rabindranath Tagore. She weaves, forms circles, gives talks, hand-throws pots and designs book-plates. She is sometimes a vegetarian, though not always a crank. Occasionally she is an expert.

She walked slowly into the room and kept her gaze fixed on Alleyn. ‘She is afraid of me,’ he thought.

‘This is Mr Alleyn, Mrs Bünz,’ Dr Otterly said.

Alleyn shook hands with her. Her own short stubby hand was tremulous and the palm was damp. At his invitation, she perched warily on a chair. Fox sat down behind her and palmed his notebook out of his pocket.

‘Mrs Bünz,’ Alleyn said, ‘in a minute or two I’m going to throw myself on your mercy.’

She blinked at him.

‘Zo?’ said Mrs Bünz.

‘I understand you’re an expert on folklore and, if ever anybody needed an expert, we do.’

‘I have gone a certain way.’

‘Dr Otterly tells me,’ Alleyn said, to that gentleman’s astonishment, ‘that you have probably gone as far as anyone in England.’

‘Zo,’ she said, with a magnificent inclination towards Otterly.

‘But, before we talk about that, I suppose I’d better ask you the usual routine questions. Let’s get them over as soon as possible. I’m told that you gave Mr William Andersen a lift –‘

They were off again on the old trail, Alleyn thought dejectedly, and not getting much farther along it. Mrs Bünz’s account of the Guiser’s hitch-hike corresponded with what he had already been told.

‘I was so delighted to drive him,’ she began nervously. ‘It was a great pleasure to me. Once or twice I attempted, tactfully, to a little draw him out but he was, I found, angry, and not inclined for cawnversation.’

‘Did he say anything at all, do you remember?’

‘To my recollection he spoke only twice. To begin with, he invited me by gesture to stop and, when I did so, he asked me in his splendid, splendid rich dialect, “Be you goink up-alongk?” On the drive, he remarked that, when he found Mr Ernie Andersen he would have the skin off of his body. Those, however, were his only remarks.’

‘And when you arrived?’

‘He descended and hurried away.’

‘And what,’ Alleyn asked, ‘did you do?’

The effect of the question, casually put, upon Mrs Bünz was extraordinary. She seemed to flinch back into her clothes as a tortoise into its shell.

‘When you got there, you know,’ Alleyn gently prompted her, ‘what did you do?’

Mrs Bünz said in a cold-thickened voice: ‘I became a spectator. Of course.’

‘Where did you stand?’

Her head sank a little further into her shoulders.

‘Inside the archway.’

‘The archway by the house as you come in?’

‘Yes.’

‘And from there you watched the dance?’

Mrs Bünz wetted her lips and nodded.

‘That must have been an absorbing experience. Had you any idea of what was in store for you?’

‘Ach! No! No, I swear it! No!’ She almost shouted.

‘I meant,’ Alleyn said, ‘in respect of the dance itself.’

‘The dance,’ Mrs Bünz said in a strangulated croak, ‘is unique.’

‘Was it all that you expected?’

‘But of course!’ She gave a little gasp and appeared to be horror stricken. ‘Really,’ Alleyn thought, ‘I seem to be having almost too much success with Mrs Bünz. Every shy a coconut.’

She had embarked on an elaborate explanation. All folk dance and drama had a common origin. One expected certain elements. The amazing thing about the Five Sons was that it combined so rich an assortment of these elements as well as some remarkable features of its own. ‘It has everythink. But everythink,’ she said and was plagued by a gargantuan sneeze.

‘And did they do it well?’

Mrs Bünz said they did it wonderfully well. The best performance for sheer execution in England. She rallied from whatever shock she had suffered and began to talk incomprehensibly of galleys, split-jumps and double capers. Not only did she remember every move of the Five Sons and the Fool in their twice-repeated dance, but she had noted the positions of the Betty and Hobby. She remembered how these two pranced round the perimeter and how, later on, the Betty chased the young men and flung his skirts over their heads and the Hobby stood as an image behind the dolmen. She remembered everything.

‘This is astonishing,’ he said, ‘for you to retain the whole thing, I mean, after seeing it only once. Extraordinary. How do you do it?’

‘I – I – have a very good memory,’ said Mrs Bünz, and gave an agonized little laugh. ‘In such matters my memory is phenomenal.’ Her voice died away. She looked remarkably uncomfortable. He asked her if she took notes and she said at once she didn’t, and then seemed in two minds whether to contradict herself.

Her description of the dance tallied in every respect with the accounts he had already been given, with one exception. She seemed to have only the vaguest recollection of the Guiser’s first entrance when, as Alleyn had already been told, he had jogged round the arena and struck the Mardian Dolmen with his clown’s bladder. But, from then onwards, Mrs Bünz knew everything right up to the moment when Ralph stole Ernie’s sword. After that, for a short period, her memory seemed again to be at fault. She remembered that, somewhere about this time, the Hobby Horse went off, but had apparently forgotten that Ernie gave chase after Ralph and only had the vaguest recollection, if any, of Ralph’s improvised fooling with Ernie’s sword. Moreover, her own uncertainty at this point seemed to embarrass her very much. She blundered about from one fumbled generalization to another.

‘The solo was interesting –’

‘Wait a bit,’ Alleyn said. She gulped and blinked at him. ‘Now look here, Mrs Bünz. I’m going to put it to you that from the time the first dance ended with the mock death of the Fool until the solo began, you didn’t watch the proceedings at all. Now is that right?’

‘I was not interested –’

‘How could you know you wouldn’t be interested if you didn’t even look? Did you look, Mrs Bünz?’

She gaped at him with an expression of fear. She was elderly and frightened and he supposed that, in her mind, she associated him with monstrous figures of her past. He was filled with compunction.

Dr Otterly appeared to share Alleyn’s feeling. He walked over to her and said: ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Bünz. Really, there’s nothing to be frightened about, you know. They only want to get at the facts. Cheer up.’

His large doctor’s hand fell gently on her shoulder.

She gave a falsetto scream and shrank away from him.

‘Hallo!’ he said good-humouredly, ‘what’s all this? Nerves? Fibrositis?’

‘I – yes – yes. The cold weather.’

‘In your shoulders?’

‘Ja. Both.’

‘Mrs Bünz,’ Alleyn said, ‘will you believe me when I remind you of something I think you must already know? In England the Police Code has been most carefully framed to protect the public from any kind of bullying or overbearing behaviour on the part of investigating officers. Innocent persons have nothing to fear from us. Nothing. Do you believe that?’

It was difficult to hear what she said. She had lowered her head and spoke under her breath.

‘… because I am German. It does not matter to you that I was anti-Nazi; that I am naturalized. Because I am German, you will think I am capable. It is different for Germans in England.’

The three men raised a little chorus of protest. She listened without showing any sign of being at all impressed.

They think I am capable,’ she said, ‘of anything.’

‘You say that, don’t you, because of what Ernie Andersen shouted out when he stood last night on the dolmen?’

Mrs Bünz covered her face with her knotty little hands.

‘You remember what that was, don’t you?’ Alleyn asked.

Dr Otterly looked as if he would like to protest but caught Alleyn’s eye and said nothing.

Alleyn went on: ‘He pointed his sword at you, didn’t he, and said, “Ask her. She knows. She’s the one that did it.” Something like that, wasn’t it?’ He waited for a moment but she only rocked herself a little with her hands still over her face.

‘Why do you think he said that, Mrs Bünz?’ Alleyn asked.

In a voice so muffled that they had to strain their ears to hear her, she said something quite unexpected.

‘It is because I am a woman,’ said Mrs Bünz.