The Dancing Horse

by Angus MacVicar

  ‘You misunderstand me,’ Donald interrupted, with a professional smoothness at variance with his rugged looks. ‘Obviously the dead man had no money. But the police say that his pockets were all empty. That seems odd to me, and I was just wondering if you had noticed anything — a box of matches, a cigarette-end, even a scrap of paper.’

  For a second dark eyelids were lowered discreetly, like curtains, and Donald knew that he was on to something. Then the man looked up and glared at him. ‘There was nothing,’ he growled, from the back of his throat.

  ‘Curiosity is only natural,’ said Donald, offering a cigarette. ‘I am curious myself. So is the Echo. And the Echo, as you know, pays well for information. If necessary we conceal the source of our information.’

  The other ignored the case. Turning away, he looked out of the window at Sid Green busily chatting with a prospective model in a duffle-coat, at little groups of people hastening past his shop. Donald lit a cigarette and waited.

  Suddenly Aristide swung round. One hand groped beneath his apron and emerged with a crumpled piece of paper. He slapped it on the counter.

  ‘All right!’ he cried. ‘You win. There was nothing, as I said — only this. Take it and leave me in peace.’

  Thank you very much. Now, what about a photo?’

  The proprietor flushed and extended a huge hand, like an amateur actor registering sharp dismay. Passionately he whispered: ‘No, please. It is enough. Keep that man outside! I do not wish my photograph. I have — reasons.’

  ‘Very well. You’ve played the game. So will I. But before I go and call off Bloodhound Green, let’s have a pound of your gammon, please.’

  Aristide’s troubled face smoothed itself into a trader’s smile. ‘Ah, certainement,’ he bowed. ‘What would you wish — the Danish high-class at fifteen shillings, or the second-class at ten shillings?’

  ‘The high-class at ten pounds.’

  ‘Ten pounds!’ he whispered, eyes beginning to bulge. Then suddenly he understood and blushed like a peony rose. ‘Ah, je comprends,’ he gesticulated. ‘Mistaire Grant, you are my friend, eh?’

  ‘Of course. As long as you tell no one else about this piece of paper.’

  ‘Never, never! It is a secret between us. I am as silent as — as the dead man. Now, here is the gammon. My gratitude, it is profound!’

  Donald thrust the crinkling parcel into his pocket and went out on to the hot, garlic-scented street, wondering if he had squandered his paper’s money.

  He took Sid’s arm: ‘Okay — got your pictures?’

  ‘Sure. What about Aristide?’

  ‘He’s shy. Probably woman trouble.’

  ‘Well, why should we worry?’

  ‘Oh, he’s not important. At least I don’t think so.’

  Sid glanced sharply at his colleague. ‘Oh, ho! Got on to something?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But like Bulldog I have a feeling.’

  ‘You Scots! What’s the pay-off?’

  Donald showed him the paper. It was a leaf torn from a diary — a small pocket diary, three days to a page, with compressed information about sunsets and saints. On it was a series of pencilled doodles — lines and shadings, little circles and dots, and in a corner the rough sketch of a horse rearing up on its hind legs.

  ‘Like Bulldog on one of his bad days, remarked Donald, indicating the horse.

  Sid chuckled. ‘Dead right! But as a clue — what d’you make of it?’

  ‘Nothing yet. I don’t even know that it is a clue — that’s the trouble. Look, we need exercise. What about walking back to the office via Berwick Street?’

  ‘Suits me.’ Expertly humping his camera on one shoulder, Sid waved farewell to the beards and jeans whose owners were still watching with patient interest. ‘But cripes,’ he added, ‘you’re lucky all you’ve got to carry is a note-book!’

  Donald was quiet as they entered Berwick Street, where individuals of many nationalities were enjoying the sun. He had found something for Bulldog, but was that something of any value? An instinct told him that it was, but instinct is never a reassuring companion. Reason suggested that doodlers are legion.

  Latin-looking women, black hair twisted into careless knots, bargained for vegetables with gesticulating barrow-boys. Natty in their draped American jackets and gaudy shirts, negroes loitered to admire gleaming pyramids of colour on the fruit stalls. Donald saw them all, but they remained dim photographs on the surface of his brain. He was thinking in a fashion which for him was oddly sad, a legacy, perhaps, from Celtic forbears. In the dark and silent night a man had been murdered only a few yards away; but now there was noise and dust and laughter in the busy street. Life was cheap in Soho.

  Donald smiled wryly at the indigo of his mood. But as a reporter he knew that it was manifestly true: life was cheap in Soho — as cheap as the little dancing toy of wood and string and coloured cardboard being demonstrated for their benefit by a sloe-eyed Cretan girl.

  ‘You buy it?’ she shrilled, smiling and leaning across her stall, while her blouse slipped off one brown shoulder. ‘You buy the dancing horse?’

  Mentally Donald shook himself, as if roused from somnolence by a cold douche.

  ‘Nice gentlemen! You buy the dancing horse?’

  The words jigged before his mind’s eye. They described perfectly the sketch on the diary page which now reposed in his note-book. As they stopped beside the stall his brain clicked into gear. Somewhere — not so long ago — he had heard or read the same phrase.

  Sid ogled the girl. ‘What’s this you’ve got?’ he said.

  ‘The dancing horse. See, its legs are worked by the string. It leaps and prances — like the real horse, no?’ She turned to the staring Donald. ‘Vairry nice. For your baby, eh? And for you a bargain. Only two shillings and sixpence.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, abruptly, ‘I’ll buy it.’

  Flashing white teeth at him, she began to wrap it up. ‘Oh, thank you. Vairry cheap, eh? Vairry nice for baby.’

  But Sid was not to be denied. ‘Say,’ he drawled, imitating without conspicuous success a tough American in a film, ‘haven’t you and I met some place before?’

  ‘No, sir — nevair!’ She laughed, dark ringlets bobbing against the nape of her neck.

  ‘Could be arranged, you know!’

  ‘Maybe. But my father has a beeg knife. He slits the throat of Englishman — like this — cchk!’

  ‘I see. Very nice. Very clean.’

  She finished tying the parcel and presented it to Donald. He put three shillings on the stall and told her to keep the change. As she thanked him in her warm and lively voice, expressing a hope that his baby might be very happy, her eyelids reminded him of Miss Kelly’s.

  Sid waved her good-bye. ‘Morning, sweetie pie. Pity you have a father!’

  ‘Morning, sir,’ she giggled. ‘Come again some time.’

  The crowd pressed round them as they went slowly towards the end of the street. Donald mentioned his vague recollection of the phrase, ‘the dancing horse’, but admitted his inability to pinpoint its origin.

  Sid hitched his camera into a more comfortable position. He said: ‘Bulldog may be able to help you.’

  THREE

  Asking Bulldog for help was like cauterizing a wound: a painful process justified only by the gravity of the trouble, but almost invariably worthwhile.

  Donald’s trouble was grave enough. He felt that he was on the verge of a discovery. But no matter how hard he concentrated he was unable to fix the dead man’s sketch in relation to the shifting background of his memory.

  Miss Kelly removed her typing glasses, the better to observe her employer’s face while Donald posed his problem; and as the interview continued she was encouraged to note that her favourite among the reporters remained unruffled by Bulldog’s menacing growls.

  ‘“The dancing horse”? How the blazes should I know what it means!’

  ‘You know everyth
ing,’ replied his visitor, flicking cigarette ash into a tray on the desk. ‘Or so we’re led to believe.’

  ‘Eh?’ For a moment the cauldron seemed ready to boil over; but it soon settled again, as it always did in the face of cool friendliness. ‘Look, Grant,’ the News Editor went on, ‘I used to be a reporter, too. But I was brought up to ferret out facts for myself without bothering my elders and betters. Of course the whole world’s gone haywire nowadays! Take the miners. And the steelmen. And the farmers. Can’t stand on their own damned feet for five minutes. Always whining for help from the Government. But I thought that newspapermen at least — ’

  ‘We’re off the point,’ interrupted Donald, gently.

  ‘What? Of course we’re off the point. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s not my business to solve your childish crossword puzzles. “The dancing horse”!’ he bellowed. ‘I don’t know what it means. Why should I? It’s your pigeon. Dammit, you spend this paper’s hard-earned money on filthy gammon and a damned silly toy and then expect me to — ’ He broke off, suddenly, a dark calm smoothing out the crumpled lines on his face. ‘“The dancing horse”,’ he murmured to himself.

  ‘So something has occurred to you after all?’

  ‘Something has occurred to me.’ He thrust out a long chin in Donald’s direction. After a pause he continued: ‘There’s a column in this paper of ours called The Town Crier — you should read it some time. Last week it had a piece about the Minotaur in Greek Street, or rather about a new picture which has just been hung in the main restaurant.

  Even as he spoke Donald remembered. The groping searchlight found its objective and stayed still. He heard Bulldog listing facts, but the facts were already clear in his mind. The Minotaur was owned by a character named Spike Maguire, a former light-heavyweight champion whose advertising gimmick was an interest — more or less sincere — in contemporary paintings. His latest purchase, now hanging on the crowded walls of his restaurant, was a picture by the young and currently fashionable Scots artist, Sorley Hetherington. Its title, which had been mentioned in The Town Crier, was ‘The Dancing Horse’.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Donald, when his Editor had finished. ‘That’s exactly what I wanted to know. I’ll do my sports article this afternoon and have a shufti at the Minotaur tonight.’

  Bulldog gave a ferocious grin, his way of showing satisfaction. ‘Good!’ he said. ‘Mark it down to expenses. Spike himself usually appears about ten o’clock. He likes playing host in the American manner.’

  ‘There may be nothing in it, of course.’

  ‘That’s obvious.’

  ‘The point is, I thought you were going on holiday today?’

  ‘My holiday can wait.’

  ‘I see.’ Donald got up, big and awkward and apparently lazy. ‘You’re not using me as bait, by any chance?’

  Bulldog scowled. ‘Scram, boy — scram! I have work to do.’

  ‘Okay, you old spider!’

  ‘And don’t “okay” me like a copy-boy! This damned office is getting to sound more like Times Square every day!’

  Miss Kelly smiled to herself and replaced her glasses on her attractive nose. Having been a secretary with the Echo for several years she could sense when the male members of the staff, carelessly tough as they always tried to appear, were inwardly pleased and excited at the prospect of a good story. She wished Donald Grant well in his investigations and gave a little sigh — not really of disappointment but rather of gently melancholy at the inappropriateness of things — as she imagined how nice it would have been if he’d asked her to accompany him to the Minotaur.

  But Donald went alone. In his digs in Bloomsbury he bathed and shaved and changed his suit in a simmer of anticipation — the pleasurable anticipation of a reporter who feels that the breaks are with him. What lay behind it all he had no idea. Sufficient in the meantime that he should follow where his instincts led. Half an hour later he sat in Spike Maguire’s restaurant, at a table from which he had an excellent view of ‘The Dancing Horse’ on the opposite wall.

  Fortunately the place was not too busy. The atmosphere was fairly cool, and customers seated on the long padded benches had ample elbow-room. On a tiny, flower-decorated platform at one end a violinist and pianist played digestive music. Donald was in a mood to rise above what Sid Green called ‘Caledonian culinary conventionality’ and ordered scampi and a half-bottle of white bordeaux — La Flora Blanche, which was the waiter’s recommendation.

  Being Spike’s most recent acquisition, the picture had a place of honour beneath a cunning floodlight. It was a typical Hetherington landscape, with the cragginess of Scotland captured by bold sweeps of the palette-knife. Yet in the luminous sky and in the glimpse in the background of a stretch of silky sea, the artist had portrayed that other and complementary quality of Donald’s homeland — romantic mystery. The dominating feature was a rugged mountain, with a curious rock-formation at its summit shaped like a horse rearing up on its hind legs. The sketch on the page of the diary was exactly similar.

  Donald ate and drank and tried to think of a possible tie-up between a murdered man in Soho and a picture by Sorley Hetherington. But all the time he was conscious of a growing nostalgia — a desire to leave behind the petrol fumes and nervous speed of London and breathe again at leisure the clean, cool air of Scotland, where he had lived for the first twenty years of his life. The picture, of course, was the cause of his restlessness, aided and abetted, perhaps, by the wine and the music and the shaded lights. In any case, it was a highly improper feeling for a reporter fumbling at the knots of a story.

  Telling himself that it was time he got down to business, he finished his scampi and washed down a final scrap of brown bread and butter with a mouthful of La Flora Blanche. Then he got up, lit a cigarette and beckoned the waiter.

  ‘Yes, sir? You enjoyed your meal?’

  ‘Very much. I’m going across to have a look at the pictures. See that no one pinches my place.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. You wish coffee?’

  ‘I’ll see.’

  ‘Mr. Maguire has just come in. Shall I tell him you are from the Echo — a friend of Mr. MacPhail’s?’

  ‘Right. Thank you.’

  He went and stood beneath ‘The Dancing Horse’, studying it and attempting to plan his next move. But the murmur of conversation, the chink of dishes and the gentle moan of the violin had a lulling effect. The air was warmer in the space where the picture was, touching him with tentative fingers of drowsiness.

  Then suddenly he was awake and alert, tense with the conviction that he was being watched. He started as a strong hand gripped his shoulder.

  ‘Well, well, Mr. Grant! I’m sure happy to make your acquaintance.’

  Spike Maguire had been born in a back street in Newcastle, but in his rise to riches he had acquired not only a proud selection of dinner-suits but also a transatlantic accent. He grinned, his burly figure poised in welcome; and while Donald realized that such heartiness was probably a deliberate policy, at the same time he couldn’t help liking the broad and battered face.

  “Good evening, Spike. How are you?’

  ‘In the pink, boy, in the pink.’ He patted his guest’s arm. ‘Any friend of Mr. MacPhail’s,’ he went on, ‘is welcome in the Minotaur. Yes, sir!’

  Donald replied with a broad, slow smile. ‘You won’t be overcrowded, then!’

  Spike took a moment to appreciate the joke. Then he chuckled, loudly. ‘Aw, I guess you’re kidding! Mr. MacPhail’s a real nice guy, once you get to know him.’ He took out a large silk handkerchief and mopped his brow before adding: ‘What d’you think of my new picture?’

  Donald said he had just been admiring it.

  ‘Sure. Everybody admires it. My pal Sorley, he’s the finest artist of them all.’

  ‘What interests me is how well he’s got that rock-formation on the mountain-top. Exactly like a dancing horse.’

  ‘Yeah, magnificent.�
� Spike’s tone betrayed nothing but artistic enthusiasm. ‘Hetherington will soon be as big a name in Scotland as MacTaggart. Take it from me, Mr. Grant.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. But tell me — this is no imaginary landscape. That’s evident from the detail. Do you happen to know exactly where it is?’

  ‘Sure, boy, sure! I got the whole history from Sorley himself. It’s a place in Kintyre. Near the Mull of Kintyre, he said.’

  ‘I see. You know, I think you’ve found a masterpiece.’

  ‘Yeah, I think so, too.’ The shrewd eyes which had caused the downfall of so many budding light-heavyweights became a trifle wistful. ‘Maybe you could write an article about it?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Good publicity for the Minotaur, eh?’

  ‘There’s that.’

  Spike sighed. This large reporter with the wide shoulders and easy-going manner was unusually cautious. ‘Oh, well, never mind,’ he said, vaguely. ‘What about a bottle of wine? On the house, Mr. Grant.’

  ‘Sorry, I’ve reached the coffee stage. But thanks all the same.’

  ‘Don’t give it a thought,’ smiled Spike, accepting without undue dismay the discovery of independence. ‘Any time you want to see my pictures come right in. All for free, boy. All for free.’

  Donald returned to his table, puzzled but still conscious of excitement — an excitement mixed oddly with uneasiness. He was so preoccupied that when the waiter spoke at his shoulder it was a second or two before he could refocus his thoughts.

  ‘You’ve seen the pictures, sir?’

  ‘What? The pictures? Oh, yes. Very fine.’

  Discreetly the waiter lowered his voice. ‘I kept your place, as you said — but the young lady, she would insist on taking a seat at your table.’

  Donald realized that a few feet away on the wall-bench there sat a girl, who had obviously come in during his talk with the proprietor. He had never seen her before.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he answered. ‘I’ll be going presently.’