‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, clutching at his arm, and speaking with that charming trick of hers which gave each newcomer the impression that he and he alone was the reason for the gathering. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. Isn’t it a crush? I’m so tired. Wouldn’t Johnnie have loved it? Look at him up there, smiling all over his face.’ She nodded her bonnet at the Sargent portrait. ‘I do hope he’s not tormenting Charles Tanqueray at some heavenly peephole.’
She paused for breath and, leaning heavily on his arm, gazed round anxiously at the visitors.
‘There’s whisky and soda on the balcony,’ she murmured. ‘I think Max has got a cocktail bar there too. I’m not supposed to approve. I don’t know whether I do or not. I can’t get over the feeling that gin’s so vulgar. It always was when we were young. But now, since it’s come into money, as it were, I suppose it’s all right. Look at the dear old Bishop,’ she continued practically in the same breath, ‘standing over there. Doesn’t he look a dear? Don’t breathe a word to a soul – but his bootmaker pads his gaiters just a little bit. I know, because he came to dinner here one night and got his feet so wet I made him take them off. He sat in front of my fire with a quilt over his knees. We talked about sin, I remember.’
‘John Lafcadio should be very grateful to you,’ said Mr Campion. ‘It’s a very brilliant gathering.’
She sighed, a little murmur of satisfaction, and her faded brown eyes twinkled.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘It makes me feel thirty-five again. Everyone here – everyone admiring Johnnie. It’s all going smoothly; everyone being polite, very silly, and very flattering.’
As the last word left her lips there was a faint whirr over their heads and every light in the studio went out, leaving the brilliant assembly in complete darkness save for the faint glow from each fire. Belle’s grip on Mr Campion’s arm tightened involuntarily.
‘The shilling in the meter!’ she murmured huskily. ‘Oh, Albert, I forgot it!’
The immediate effect of the sudden darkness was such as is usual in such emergencies: there was the familiar pause in the conversation, the startled giggle of some half-wit female, somebody whispered and someone else stumbled over something. And then politeness reasserted itself, and conversation went on only a little more quietly than before.
Mr Campion felt in his pockets. ‘I’ve got one,’ he said. ‘Leave it to me.’
He set off, crossing the room cautiously. The majority of people had the intelligence to stand still, but there were a few who moved about, aimlessly it seemed.
Campion found his way to the little doorway under the balcony with some difficulty; he also experienced some delay because Mr Potter, who had grown tired of standing beside his ‘lithographs’, had placed a chair for himself with its back against the door.
It was while Campion was removing this obstruction that he noticed some commotion on the far side of the room, somewhere near the jewellery table. He thought nothing of it at the time and hurried into the cold concrete passage within, where, with the aid of his cigarette lighter, he located the meter and inserted the shilling.
As he came up into the once more brilliantly lighted room he became aware again of the disturbance near the table, and for an instant the wild notion came to him that some sort of smash-and-grab raid had taken place.
The next moment he saw that it was a case of faintness. One or two people had gathered round a figure doubled up beside the table. The rest of the guests were studiously taking no notice of the incident, and, miraculously, it seemed, a long queue had already formed to take leave of Belle.
Max, flustered a little by the incident, but keeping his head admirably, was assisting the old lady, and Donna Beatrice was making her way towards the door to shake hands with her acquaintances after they had parted from Belle.
Lisa and Fred Rennie were among the group by the table, and even as Mr Campion looked he saw Rennie bend down and hoist a figure up before taking him out to the model’s room through the little door from which Campion had just emerged. That young man, seeing nothing else that he could do, joined the queue.
The business of saying farewell seemed to be an interminable affair and the queue moved very slowly.
He had allowed his attention to wander, and it must have been a good seven minutes later, when he had moved up some six feet or so in the line, that he became aware of Lisa staring at him intently as though she would force his attention by sheer personal magnetism. As soon as he caught her eye she beckoned to him furiously.
He stepped out of the line and hurried over to her. She led him over to the little door under the balcony, her bony fingers biting into his arm. Once they were out of sight he turned to her enquiringly and was startled by her appearance. The little woman in the tight purple dress was staring at him, her yellow face a mask of horror. When she spoke her lips moved stiffly and her voice was strangled.
‘It was young Mr Dacre,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. And the scissors – oh, Mr Campion, the scissors!’
The young man put his arm about her as she tottered towards him.
CHAPTER 4
‘Not I!’
–
THE steady stream of departing guests flowed slowly out of the studio. A gloom had descended upon the gathering, although the majority had no idea at all that anything unusual had happened; much less that one of their number now lay dead in the little model’s room behind the panelling, surrounded by a terrified group, and guarded by a bewildered doctor.
The atmosphere was rather one of cold inhospitality than horror, as though the lights had never regained their former brilliance and the occasion had been somehow disappointing.
Nevertheless, probably everyone save the immediate members of the household and Mr Campion might have left the house without being aware of the tragedy at all had it not been for Rosa-Rosa, who suddenly burst through the little doorway under the balcony, screaming.
The noise she made attracted everyone’s attention, and her appearance did the rest.
Her training had made her face expressive, and now she presented a picture of such exquisite terror that it was impossible to disregard it. Her yellow hair, crimped like a Botticelli angel’s, hung stiffly round her face; her eyes, widened to their utmost, were black pits of fear, and her wide mouth was drawn up into a blue O in her pallid face.
‘Santa Maria! Madre di Dio! È morto! cosa posso fare? Il mio marito è morto – ucciso!’
The shrill Italian ended and she began to shout in English.
‘Murdered! Murdered! Right through the stomach. They did it with scissors.’
It took Max just those three seconds to get across the room and seize the girl by the arms, while the shocked silence in the room deepened into a growing perception of horror.
Max spoke to the girl softly and volubly in her own language. She began to sob noisily, great gulping animal sounds which whipped the already jolted nerves of the company to the point of agony.
A few of the diehard school of manners clung to their standards and talked together quietly, affecting not to have noticed this second disturbance, whilst they edged as unobtrusively as possible towards the exit.
But the majority forgot themselves sufficiently to stand silent and agape, watching the girl as Max led her firmly back to the door under the balcony.
These were rewarded by the unusual spectacle of Sir Gordon Woodthorpe, that eminent society physician who had been present at the reception, hurrying out of the little concrete passage, his elegant white hair dishevelled and two patches of crimson burning in the sides of his throat, while he licked his lips feverishly, a nervous habit that had persisted since childhood.
He hurried over to Belle, who was standing in her place by the door, superbly gallant and unruffled in the nightmare crisis. He spoke to her for some moments and even the diehards looked curiously in their direction.
After the first few moments Sir Gordon appeared to be arguing with the old lady, offering, it appeared, to take a dut
y from her shoulders, but she repulsed him gently. Taking his arm, she leant heavily upon it and raised her voice, which was still clear and soft in spite of her age and emotion.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she began, and then her voice quivered, and she stood looking at them, her old mouth trembling slightly.
There was silence instantly. The moment was one of drama and those minds which had hastily dismissed Rosa-Rosa’s outburst as a regrettable, hysterical, or drunken incident suddenly wheeled round to face the half-formed fear which had secretly assailed them all.
‘My dears,’ said Belle piteously, ‘something very terrible has happened. There has been – well – there has been an accident.’
Her voice was trembling unashamedly, and her unconscious use of the endearment made her announcement very real, and her appeal very personal. She went on, still leaning heavily on the doctor’s arm, while they listened to her breathlessly with that sinking of the heart and faint sense of nausea which always come just before the worst is told.
‘A young man who was with us here a few minutes ago is now dead. He died in here when the lights were out. Sir Gordon feels that – that no one should leave until the police have come.’
She looked round her appealingly, as though imploring them to understand. It was odd what an impressive figure she was, this plump old lady in the high white bonnet and the long black dress.
‘Of course I can’t order you to stay if you want to go,’ she went on. ‘That would be absurd. In the circumstances I can only appeal to you. I can’t tell you any more. This is all I know myself.’
She finished, and Sir Gordon, very conscious of his responsibility, and the position in which he stood as Belle’s champion, escorted her to a chair on the far side of the room.
Another old woman, Lady Brain, a friend of Belle’s, of long standing, hurried over to her, and Sir Gordon, forgetting to excuse himself, turned with a sigh of relief to the door under the balcony, skilfully avoiding the eye of acquaintances who would have waylaid him.
There were many peculiarities about the murder at Little Venice. Not the least of these lay in the quality and variety of intelligences who shared its first shock.
There are in England an average of about one hundred and fifty murders a year. The majority of these are of a simple and sordid nature, and the aggregate brain-power of those present at their discovery is as a rule something less than normal.
But here in Little Venice at the time of the crime was gathered together a collection of people all notable in varying degrees, the majority recruited from the successful professional classes. Once the existence of the tragedy had percolated and the shock had been assimilated, the reaction was ordinary enough, inasmuch as the male half of the gathering formed itself into a group of grave-faced important-voiced personages anxious to cling together and protect their womenfolk, while the said womenfolk hung back and, with the natural secrecy of their kind, chattered in little groups with lowered eyes and voices.
As soon as it was established that the victim of the tragedy was a young man scarcely known, even by sight, to anyone, the peculiarities of this particular gathering began to assert themselves.
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred Belle’s hearers had taken the sense of her words rather than their literal meaning; that is to say, they realized that a murder had taken place, moreover, a mysterious murder and in their own immediate proximity, and with the exception of two or three rare and somewhat unnatural souls each man and woman began to consider the affair as it most nearly touched himself.
Some were appalled by the thought of the notoriety entailed, others were shamefacedly excited by it, and immediately wires were jerked, wheels began to turn, and fifty little comedies were enacted.
The sturdy, brown-skinned, and rather stupid young equerry to the Ambassador, whose eyes had snapped while Belle was speaking and whose brain was quick to seize the possibilities of any situation, permitted himself the thought that if only some foolish policeman could be persuaded to forget himself for a moment and offer an ill-advised question to His Excellency, quite a little insult could be worked up, and an unpleasant incident only averted by the brilliance and tact of His Excellency’s equerry.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the room a soldierly man whose unobtrusive polish and sharp intelligence had made him invaluable to the Foreign Office stood watching the Ambassador’s equerry and reflecting that a timely telephone call to headquarters must certainly be arranged somehow, and that, meanwhile, every conceivable means must be employed to get the Ambassador and his equerry out of the house before any fool policeman had a chance to put his foot in it. He began therefore to move unobtrusively towards the house.
Max Fustian, standing in the shadow just inside the door under the balcony, glanced swiftly round the room, and made the gratifying discovery that the only reporter left of the horde which had descended upon the studio earlier in the afternoon was the large Mr Cleethorpe of the insignificant Daily Paper.
This usually diffident soul was in the very act of swooping down upon Belle when Max shot out and intercepted him.
‘Perhaps I can give you all you want to know, Mr Cleethorpe.’
Max’s unctuous murmur had a steely ring in it born of desperation.
‘You must be very, very careful of your facts, you know.’
The English law of libel being what it is, Mr Cleethorpe’s timorous disposition permitted him to be side-tracked, and the two men entered into an earnest conversation.
At the far end of the narrow concrete passage, standing beneath the very meter into which he had so light-heartedly dropped a shilling only fifteen minutes before, Mr Campion hesitated. On his right was the door of the model’s room from which he had just come, and the recollection of the scene within was still clear in his mind. It had been very stuffy and dusty. The dressing-table was dismantled and the green-covered couch had looked dingy, like the furniture in a second-hand shop. It was upon this couch that the body still lay.
Mr Campion, in spite of his long association with crime, was not callous enough to be entirely unmoved by the spectacle of a young man suddenly dead.
He was human enough also to consider his own position. Very few people knew much about Mr Campion. In the first place, that was not his name. The majority of his friends and acquaintances knew vaguely that he was the younger son of some personage, who had taken up the adventurous calling of unofficial investigator and universal uncle at first as a hobby and finally as a career. His successes were numerous, but for the best reasons in the world he remained in the background and avoided publicity like the plague.
There were some who insisted that he was in reality a member of Scotland Yard’s vast army of unobtrusive agents whose work is done entirely behind the scenes, but Mr Campion himself would have denied this vigorously. The fact remained, however, that he had many friends at Scotland Yard.
At the moment he was in a quandary. He was in the house of friends. Obviously, it was his duty to do what he could. He knew enough of English law and English justice to realize that in a case of murder the pursuit is relentless and the punishment unavoidable.
He had no doubt in his mind concerning the author of the crime. He could see Linda now in his mind’s eye as she had turned from the window and come towards him. Temporary insanity, of course.
Rapidly, he considered the chances of there being insufficient proof. The handles of the long narrow-bladed scissors still protruded from the grey pullover. Sir Gordon Woodthorpe had been intelligent enough not to attempt to remove the weapon before the arrival of the official doctor.
The useless ornate handles presented no flat surface, so that the chances of them retaining fingerprints were remote. Nevertheless, it would all be very difficult.
He was shocked when he thought of Linda. She was just the wild emotional type who might easily succumb to a sudden impulse. It was amazing that she had waited until the darkness.
Of course, even if the best happened and the matt
er were dropped for lack of evidence, she would have to be put under restraint.
He passed his hand over his forehead. It was damp and he felt cold. God, what a terrible thing to have happened! Poor Linda. Poor, tragic, insufferable young blackguard lying dead in the next room.
There was the model, too, who had probably been in love with him. Lisa was quietening her now, speaking harshly in her own language, bright startled tears on her withered cheeks.
Mr Campion checked himself. Something must be done immediately, before some bobby off the beat made matters even more difficult. He remembered that the telephone was on the landing and that the door on his left led into the garden. Inspector Stanislaus Oates was the man to get hold of; the shrewdest and at the same time most kindly member of the Yard.
It was Sunday afternoon; therefore he would probably be at home. Campion remembered the number as he ran: Norwood 4380.
Within the studio the atmosphere was becoming unbearable. There were sporadic silences, which hung heavily over the great room. One or two people were becoming hysterical. No one complained openly, largely out of deference to Belle, who with remarkable fortitude and typical good sense remained where she was, knowing that her presence alone prevented an open demonstration.
The little comedies continued, and some of them were tragicomedies.
Herbert Wolfgang, that bouncing, rosy dumpling of a man who always permitted his name at the head of his gossip articles and whose somewhat chequered career was drawing to an ignoble close in the paragraphing of his erstwhile friends, fingered his stock and considered the situation. Here was a heaven-sent piece of luck. Everybody present too.
He looked round at the white anxious faces, and almost smiled. It was too good to be true. One of his most profitable sidelines lay in publicity agenting for society women. The room contained at least four of his clients. And now, probably for the first time during his acquaintance with them, they were all genuinely in the news. It was really damnably fortunate. His fingers itched for his typewriter.
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