Margery Allingham's Mr Campion's Farewell

by Mike Ripley

  It was three minutes before a key scratched again behind the panelling, the woodwork swung back and after a perceptible pause a voice from the dark cavity broke the silence.

  ‘This is the Woolpack, I suppose? Could I trickle in, d’you think?’

  ‘Please do,’ said Mr Campion. ‘Have you come far?’

  The man who stepped over the threshold was small and plump yet so nimble that he appeared to bounce. A fringe of curls surrounded a bald forehead above round protuberant eyes in a face which had once been cherubic but was now settling pouchily into middle age. A dark sweater worn over a soft white polo-necked shirt gave him a clerical appearance which was obviously deliberate.

  ‘Sweet of you. Secret passages are really not my scene – not at all. So dark, you know – so short of couth.’ He placed a large electric torch on the bar and skipped up beside it, swinging his legs as if he were supporting his entire weight by his hands.

  ‘My name’s Trump,’ he said. ‘Leslie Trump. I’m the vicar, the padre, the dog-collar dogsbody – take your pick, man. Have you been here long?’

  ‘About twelve hours,’ said Mr Campion. ‘It seems longer now I come to think of it.’

  ‘Oh, folly!’ The tenor voice was arch. ‘Not my drift at all. I mean have you been squatting around this grog shop most of the evening?’

  ‘Only for the last hour. Is it important?’

  ‘Could be, man, it could be. Provided you’re not tanked up and you kept your peepers open. Did anyone happen to use this entrance during that time? If they did someone would have noticed, wouldn’t you say? Any joy?’

  ‘Not a soul. Not even the ghost of a Carder.’

  Mr Trump considered the statement, his globular eyes focussed shrewdly on his informant and his forehead puckered with surprise.

  ‘A deliciously bad taste joke. So glad you’re with it.’ He frowned petulantly. ‘It doesn’t solve my problem, you know – makes a bigger mystery of it, in fact. If he didn’t go this-a-way – and I’m damn sure he didn’t go by the Prentice place or Humble’s because they’re locked and bolted – then he must have sneaked out by the Carders Hall. The caretaker will have gone now, so that means waiting until tomorrow before I can enquire. I find it very hard to keep my cool.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Mr Campion mildly, ‘but I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about. Has someone been exploring the underground?’

  ‘Exploring it?’ The idea seemed to amuse the newcomer and he tittered. ‘Oh no, no, no. Not exploring. I think my caller knew his way very well. It suggests a parishioner, don’t you think? Who else would drop in by our own special private entrance?’

  Mr Campion contemplated the man from above his spectacles. He saw an odd tortured little creature totally unsuited to his profession, a mixture of conceit and self-suspicion, a misfit in almost any walk of life. At the moment, he was hovering between elation and fright, happy to confide in the first interested listener.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ said Mr Campion. ‘You have had a visitor, an intruder of some sort whom you didn’t see, and you think he got in and out of the vicarage by way of the not-so-secret passage? Did he help himself to a souvenir, or leave you a message? How did you discover his existence?’

  ‘You have got the picture in one blinding flash, dear man. Some intrusive personage has been blundering around in the vicarage and left the door unlocked behind him – the door to the passage. And not very long since because Mrs Duck, my housekeeper, leaves at ten and locks everything up without fail. I came back at eleven, so that leaves rather less than an hour. Whoever it was must have heard me arrive and skipped off sharpish.’

  ‘If fact, you’ve been burgled?’

  Mr Trump continued to swing his legs. ‘Burglary? Horrid word. I don’t like to think in terms of mine and thine. I hold a few precious things in trust but if someone thinks he has a better claim he must be guided by the light as he sees it. Sometimes I doubt my own right to interpret the eighth commandment. The fact is, I don’t even know if I have been robbed. The visitor may simply have been curious.’

  ‘But the place was searched? Any serious damage?’

  ‘Oh jiminy, no. No folly of that sort. Just someone who opened up my box – it’s rather a good specimen or was – and left it with its poor little insides lying about all over the place. It looks terribly indecent in a perverse esoteric sort of way.’

  Mr Campion sat up.

  ‘Your Humble Box?’

  ‘That’s the scene, man. This joker unscrewed the board with all the dials and knobs on it, had a good look at the works, such as they are, and didn’t bother to put them back. He may even have taken some of the parts for all I know. None of them worked in any case, except a sort of barometer thing which wasn’t touched.’

  ‘Had you ever looked inside it before?’ enquired Mr Campion. ‘I’ve never seen one myself, but they sound fascinating. What did the works consist of? Damp seaweed? The mummified toe of a gouty Chinese Mandarin?’

  ‘I had just a peep when I first bought it.’ The vicar made the admission as if it was slightly indelicate. ‘Couldn’t understand a thing. A lot of glass tubes with nothing inside them, a leather bag affair, quite rotted away, and some sort of hour glass effect with sand in it. None of it worked, I promise you. I doubt if it ever did and it certainly never will now.’

  ‘I think,’ said Mr Campion, ‘that even if you haven’t been robbed you should tell the police about your visitor. You may not mind what has happened, but other people may object if there’s a chap wandering about the place breaking up antiques.’

  ‘Police?’ The little man was too shocked to remember his vernacular. He gulped, recovering himself. ‘The Fuzz? Oh, folly, no. Not poor young Wilson, not even Sergeant James. I simply couldn’t bear it. Not my scene at all. I must just hope that whoever it was will turn up again so that we can have a heart-to-heart.’

  ‘You don’t think that your visitor was making a nuisance of himself for some personal reason? He doesn’t sound like an ordinary sneak thief.’

  ‘Someone who’s got it in for me?’ Mr Trump cocked his head to one side as he considered the question. He lifted his body further on to the bar and crossed his legs. ‘A non-taker for my efforts to bring a little new thinking into theology? Alack-a-day-dee! No, I think not. I had only one example of that, apart from the usual sheep noises from some of my flock. But it was very disappointing. The ghastly truth is I’d rather hoped for better things.’

  ‘Your own Nine Days’ Wonder?’ suggested Campion.

  Mr Trump hugged himself. ‘Oh, you are quick on the uptake. A delicious sensation, finding someone who doesn’t have to wait for a recap. Yes, that’s what I meant. Like Austin Bonus, our twenty-fifth vicar. I think he was the first to be called a Nine Days’ Wonder because of his adventure, you know.’

  He glanced round the room, dropping his voice to underline the confidence about to be revealed. ‘Between you and me, I’ve sometimes wondered if he wasn’t a very clever man, who got what he wanted by threatening to make a nuisance of himself. A splendid idea but I’m afraid it’s not really true, though I’d like it to be.’

  ‘You think the Carders persuaded him to see things their way by a mixture of bullying and bribery which took them nine days?’

  ‘I fear so. He got his roof replaced and a new organ, about five thousand pounds’ worth in all and it could only have come from them – and he kept his share of the bargain, which was to cancel his children’s home and keep his trap shut. I respect him for that, you know. It must have been terribly tempting, just to drop a tiny hint here and there. He must have known who most of them were, after his experience.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Mr Campion, ‘he believed in keeping his word. Just now you said you were disappointed. Have you been trying to attract their attention?’

  ‘I?’ Trump giggled, lifted his body clear of the bar, supporting it on his hands, swung it back and forward and settled again. ‘Me? I suppose you could sa
y so. You wouldn’t be wrong and you wouldn’t be right. My little effort – my psalm book – is just to attract attention – anybody’s. Religion needs a new image. That sounds pagan but it’s true and rather witty when you come to think of it – I must remember to use it again. After it was published it did cross my tiny mind that if the Carders were still active, they might not approve, and if they tried to do anything about it, I might have a bit of a lark finding out who they are.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Not a peep out of them. Well, just a tiny one, perhaps, but I couldn’t be sure. Somebody sent me nine copies of my book in a parcel and they’d each been cut neatly in two. Still, I gather a two-shilling royalty for each one sold, so I can’t complain – eighteen bob profit is not to be sneezed at. I’m happy to laugh at that sort of joke.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound much like the Carders, except for the number,’ said Mr Campion. ‘I suppose you haven’t asked Mr Walker, the man I heard lecturing on the subject this evening, about his experiences? They say he had a nine day adventure but he didn’t mention it to his audience. He certainly didn’t want to discuss anything that happened much after 1900.’

  Mr Trump was not pleased at the suggestion. He looked away, shrugged his shoulders and beat a small petulant tattoo on the bar with his fingers.

  ‘Lemuel Walker,’ he said, as if the name was unpleasant. ‘Why pick on him? What made him so important all of a sudden? I mean, we all know he’s a nuisance and a bad influence on the young, but is he worth all that trouble? I’ve racked my brains and I can’t come up with an answer.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Mr Campion diffidently, ‘in the course of his researches for his lecture Mr Walker came up with some new facts about the Carders. For example, who the present ones are and what sort of funds they control.’

  The little man pursed his lips as if he were about to whistle.

  ‘Very acute,’ he said when he had assimilated the suggestion. ‘Very likely now I come to think of it. You’re very knowledgeable for a stranger in our midst. You could be so right. If you are, would you think Walker was bribed as well as being given a black eye? I mean, I don’t think I could put up with much pain if it came to a showdown and I find most of the martyrs a tiny bit off-beat, but if it was a question of corruption in a good cause that would be absolutely splendid. I’d love to co-operate.’ He sighed. ‘The trouble is, I seem to have missed the boat.’

  Mr Campion stood up.

  ‘If I were you,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t even wave it goodbye.’

  Five

  Crime Scene

  The architectural glories of the Church of St Catherine and St Blaise (tower in flashed flintwork, fourteenth century chancel, Carders’ parclose and carved-stone chapel with wainscot) attracted a far larger share of the congregation than could be attributed to the ministry of the Rev. Leslie Trump. Wisely, he had refrained from obtruding his personality into the church and his Sunday morning sermon, upon missions and missionaries, lacked the customary castigation of colonial pioneers. Mr Campion wandered idly from the porch (fourteenth-century decorated woodwork, groined ceiling, clustered shafts), and skirted the pond, pausing like every newcomer to watch the ducks and to lift his eyes to the flawless charm of Tudor half-timbering and local pargetting which graced the gentle slope up to the Carders Hall and the Woolpack.

  He had just drawn level with the bow window of J. Humble, Apothecary, established 1667, when a small open car drew up beside him.

  ‘Good morning, Uncle,’ said Eliza Jane Fitton. ‘I’m better now, thank you. I’ve seen the vet and he says I won’t have to be shot after all. I was just coming to see you. Hop in.’

  Like Amanda, his wife, she had a heart-shaped face which was emphasised by the casual lock across her forehead and the fall of her hair beside her cheeks. A Dior scarf, in rich autumnal tones, loose about her neck, was her only concession to femininity.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To see Ben Judd, my intended. Don’t mention the subject to him because he really believes he’s fancy-free, and a natural polygamist in any case. You may hate his stuff, especially his big oils. If you do, say so. Admit your groove got stuck around Braque and Picasso. That will clear the air and we can talk about cabbages and kings.’

  Mr Campion doubled his long legs into the car with commendable agility.

  ‘And suppose I do like them?’ he enquired. ‘Would that be disastrous?’

  ‘Watch your step about that. He hates being patronised. Ask him to be sure and send you a card for his next exhibition. That doesn’t commit you and it shows willing. Otherwise, keep your avuncular trap closed.’

  The studio, approached by a narrow lane off the main street, was one of three barns, its nearest neighbour surviving as some form of store house and the largest having been converted and expanded into a commercial garage. The ground floor studio was an enormous room partly partitioned by a curtain of fishing nets decorated with corks hanging from a cross beam. It was comfortably furnished with two low sofas, long past middle age, and tables loaded with books and gramophone records. The air hung heavy with the scent of oil paint, which is exciting or repellent according to personal temperament. Canvases crowded the walls and a very large working easel stood with its burden ostentatiously angled away from any newcomer. A tall modern window provided the main light.

  The man who greeted them seemed to have stepped from another century. He was tall, flaxen-haired and bearded, with the arrogance of a Victorian and the physical power of a Norseman. The fact that he was a painter appeared to confer unquestionable masculinity on the art. He lifted Eliza Jane by the elbows, held her at arm’s-length and deposited her on a high stool.

  ‘Sit there, Fitton, and don’t move until you’re given leave. I thought I told you not to walk without a stick?’ He greeted Campion with a jut of his beard. ‘A vixen by nature, you know, but lacking the animal’s intelligence. I can offer you almost any drink you care to name, having sold a picture last week to a man that carried folding money about his person.’

  Eliza Jane slid to her feet. ‘He does this to encourage me to work,’ she explained. ‘Get out of the way and I’ll see what’s on offer.’ Deftly she dispensed the drinks, olives and small talk, splattered with the familiar routine of amiable abuse which betrays deep understanding between people of well-matched wits.

  ‘Before I go and make omelettes,’ she said at last, ‘you can tell my uncle about the Carders. I know he’s interested, because he went to a very dull lecture in the Hall last night and had a drink afterwards with Clarissa, who’s fallen for him like a ton of bricks. Don’t flatter yourself, Albert my darling, she falls very easily. Judd, you’re one of them – the Carders, I mean. You admitted it to me in a drunken moment last year. Come clean.’

  ‘Slut!’ said Judd, grinning to show teeth. ‘Only sluts, harridans and scolds fit for the ducking stool remember what a man says in his cups. And only the worst of them repeat it. The Carders are an ancient, secret – remember that, woman, secret – and as far as I know, benevolent society. If you, sir went to some dreary lecture about them last night, you know this already. What more is there to tell?’

  ‘A very good question,’ said Mr Campion apologetically. ‘What indeed? For example, unless the answer is restricted information, how to you happen to be one?’

  Ben Judd perched himself on the edge of a table and picked up a palette knife, twirling it in his fingers.

  ‘Accident of birth,’ he said. ‘My mother was a Miss Dyer. Dyers have always been Carders, if you follow me, so there I am. I have what is called a Holding by Inheritance.’

  He pointed the knife at arms’ length directly at Eliza Jane as if he intended to transfix her.

  ‘If you want the truth about the Carders, I will give it to you complete in one sentence. They are without the shadow of a peradventure the greatest bore this world has seen since the first committee was invented. Stultifying, abysmal, epoch-making bores, severally and collectively.’


  He turned to Campion with a sweep of the knife. ‘I happen to be one of those sentimental apes who believe in keeping their word if they’ve sworn to it, or I’d be more explicit. For example, I don’t propose to give you any names I do know. But I will tell you this. The introduction ceremony takes an hour and a half, with the mug concerned either standing or kneeling. Like it says in the bit of ritual that survived and got itself into print – you swear by Yan, Tan Thethera, Methera, Pimp and all the rest of the old world ballyhoo. The Learned Clerk invests you in the Fleece of Jason, you drink from the golden cup – old Madeira, I’d say – and generally make of yourself one first class medieval fool.’

  ‘It sounds as if you’ve swallowed the medieval mumbo jumbo in one gulp,’ said Eliza Jane. ‘Have you any idea what my darling jester here is talking about, Uncle?’

  Mr Campion pushed his spectacles further back on to his face with a forefinger which remained poised and gently beating, like a conductor’s baton keeping time.

  ‘Yan, Tan, Tethera …’ He chanted softly. ‘It’s the ancient way of counting sheep. Not to get yourself to sleep you understand, but real sheep out on the hills or in fields. Used by shepherds who were unlikely to be either literate or numerate, so they invented their own system of keeping track of the woolly beasts that were their livelihood. Yan, Tan, Tethera.’ Mr Campion hummed again. ‘When sung, it has a certain operatic quality, don’t you think? Yet I would have said it came from a dialect found in more northern latitudes – Cumberland perhaps, or the Yorkshire Dales – I don’t think I’ve ever heard the expression in Suffolk.’

  ‘Hearing it once was enough for me,’ snarled the angry young artist. ‘I sent their infernal Learned Clerk what they call a Proxy in Perpetuity – had to do that because there’s money involved and they vote on it – but never again will I endure such a farrago of long-winded, out-of-date balderdash. Not for all the tea in China. Never again.’