Margery Allingham's Mr Campion's Farewell

by Mike Ripley

  Eventually Mr Campion consulted his wristwatch and announced that if he slowed his normal walking pace from that of a befuddled tortoise to that of a thirsty snail, then he would make it back to the Woolpack just as the indispensable Don would be opening up the bar for the evening session. In that, however, he was wrong, for a red-faced and breathless Don was at that very moment rapping on the front door of Eliza Jane’s cottage.

  ‘Miss Fitton, I am so sorry to have to disturb you,’ he exhaled in Eliza’s face once she had answered his knock, ‘but is Mr Campion with you?’

  ‘Yes he is, Don, and he’s been here all afternoon in case he needs an alibi.’

  ‘Do I need an alibi, Don?’ asked Campion loudly from the kitchen.

  ‘Oh no, sir, you don’t, but I reckon somebody in this village does.’

  ‘Why, Don? Has something happened to the Woolpack?’

  ‘Not to the Woolpack, Mr Campion, but to your car – your lovely car – which you left in our safe keeping in the residents’ car park. Oooh, a car like that would have been my pride and joy, and I’m sure it was yours …’

  ‘Has it been stolen?’

  ‘No, much worse than that, Mr Campion, sir,’ Don paused for dramatic effect. ‘It’s been … vandalised!’

  ‘Vandalised?’

  ‘Yes, sir. With a hammer by the looks of it.’

  Eight

  A Call on an Inspector

  It had been named after the sainted King Edmund who had been martyred at the hands of raiding Danes eleven hundred years ago. It had a history of enthusiasm for witch trials and had been solidly Parliamentarian during the Civil War apart, that is, for a period of rioting in 1646 when the Puritans attempted to ban Christmas. Many of those Puritans, no doubt in high dudgeon, had left to make new lives in a new world called Massachusetts. Those who chose to remain had prospered in the sugar-refining industry and in the brewing of beer, which many said was why the town smelled so sweet. These things Mr Campion knew about Bury St Edmunds, but he had no idea why someone should be following him there.

  The previous evening had seen Don presiding not over his optics, ice buckets, beer taps and swizzle sticks, as was his custom at that hour, but officiating over the remains of the headlamps and indicators of Mr Campion’s Jaguar in the courtyard of the Woolpack, which had once turned around mail coaches and teams of horses but now resembled a modern scrap-yard.

  Mr Campion could only agree with Don’s verdict – spoken with the solemnity of a mechanical coroner – that the front end of his elegant Jaguar, which had been safely parked in the bosom of the Woolpack, had been hammered into an ugly mass of torn and twisted metal. Shattered glass sprinkled the courtyard like spilled diamonds from headlights and sidelights that were now mere cavities in the bodywork from which straggled electrical wiring. There were hammer-head dents all the way up the bonnet, clearly put there out of anger or frustration, and the windscreen had ‘starred’ from a series of blows above the steering wheel in a clear message of eye-level hatred for the driver.

  Don was profuse in his apologies that such an atrocity could take place in Lindsay Carfax, let alone in the sanctum of the Woolpack, and that the act itself must have happened in the afternoon during those dead hours when British licensed premises were forced to close as they had been since 1915 in a forlorn attempt to increase munitions production during the war with the Kaiser. The damage had only been discovered around five o’clock when the duty dinner chef – an Italian and one of the many Italian POWs who had remained in Suffolk after a later war and gone into the catering trade (Don had added unnecessarily) – had arrived on his Vespa and immediately raised the alarm, or at least dragged Don from his afternoon nap so he could.

  Mr Campion was assured that the owner of the Woolpack (a Mr Augustine Marchant, no less) would strain every sinew to have the Jaguar repaired at his expense as the damage had occurred on Woolpack property. The wounded car would be taken to Sherman’s Garage where it would be nursed back to roadworthiness as quickly as possible, unless of course Mr Campion wished to make other arrangements, and because of the inconvenience, should he wish to extend his stay at the Woolpack, it would be as an honoured, rather than paying, guest.

  If the generosity of the hostelry and the sympathetic noises made by Eliza Jane were meant to reassure Mr Campion, they did so only until the mechanical equivalent of the Lindsay Carfax Red Cross arrived in a dirty white Bedford van fitted with a winch and towing bar and the legend Sherman & Sons Garage & Repairs, Lindsay Carfax 293 crudely stencilled on its flanks.

  Had he not been told – in a whisper from Don – that the two men in oil-stained blue overalls who approached were father and son, Campion would never have guessed, for the older man was well below average height and a positive dwarf when standing in the shadow of the younger man, who would have been a dream prop forward in any Five Nations rugby team. They introduced themselves as Shermans; the elder being Dennis and the younger, bear-sized one, Clifford. Both wore oil-stained brown overalls and both were fluent in the universal language of garage mechanics when appraising vehicles and estimating repair costs. It was a language which did not consist of words, but rather a series of tongue clicks and loud inhalations of breath over clenched teeth punctuated by a slow shaking of the head.

  The two Shermans circled the damaged car like sharks scenting blood in the water and the senior one announced that repairs were certainly possible, but would be expensive and could take two to three days. Mr Campion had reluctantly accepted his fate, committed the keys of the Jaguar into the grease-stained hands of Sherman & Son and prevailed upon Eliza Jane to act as his chauffeuse for his visit to Bury St Edmunds the next morning.

  They had left shortly after breakfast, crammed into Eliza’s sports car, its roof firmly in place to offer protection from the elements as its driver tackled the fifteen miles of narrow lanes with attack. Within two miles, Mr Campion realised they were being followed.

  ‘You know what they say: any friend of Superintendent Luke is just a man who hasn’t bought his round yet! How is Charlie, the old scallywag?’

  Detective Chief Inspector Bill Bailey had the British policeman’s knack of saying ridiculous things whilst defiantly maintaining the facial expression of a vicar at the graveside or a captain going down with his ship.

  ‘Oh, hale and hearty,’ said Campion. ‘In fact, irritatingly so for a man of his age. Allow me to introduce Miss Eliza Jane Fitton, my niece, guide and driver – at least for today. Eliza is a resident of Lindsay Carfax, though one shouldn’t hold it against her.’

  Bill Bailey took Eliza Jane’s delicately offered hand and allowed a faint smile to erode his face.

  ‘That’s always been our problem here in West Suffolk Police, though by rights I should say Suffolk Police now that all the county forces are amalgamated. You see, we’ve never been able to hold anything against the residents of Lindsay Carfax – at least nothing that would stick.’

  ‘Are we really such a nest of rogues and vagabonds in Lindsay?’ Eliza Jane framed her face with her hands, palms outward, and made a large O with her mouth.

  ‘There are one or two individuals there I wouldn’t trust with the Darby and Joan Club savings fund and one or two I wouldn’t believe if they told me the time by the church clock – if the church has a clock, that is. The thing – the thing which gets under the collar of every copper who’s had any dealings with the place – is that there’s just not enough crime there.’

  Now the O of Eliza’s mouth increased in diameter.

  ‘Not enough crime?’ she exclaimed. ‘Are you blaming us for being too law-abiding?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not,’ said Bill Bailey, ‘and I couldn’t blame you for that if you were. All I mean is that for a place of that size, even buried out in the sticks, you would expect more crime to be reported: a bit of vandalism, lead going missing off the church roof, joy-riding, after-hours drinking, sheep-stealing, burning the odd haystack … anything. Yet virtually nothing ever gets repor
ted from Lindsay Carfax; either the place is remarkably well-behaved or it somehow takes care of its own bad apples.’

  ‘Well, I am going to brighten your day, Chief Inspector,’ grinned Campion, ‘by reporting not one but two instances of malfeasance in Lindsay Carfax, thus presenting you with a positive crime wave.’

  Succinctly, Campion recounted the incidents of the booby trap on Ben Judd’s external staircase and the wanton damage to his prize Jaguar, to which Bill Bailey listened politely but not intently before responding:

  ‘Disturbing, I’ll grant you, but hardly requiring the Flying Squad. What I’d really like to know is what a man of your calibre, Mr Campion – a calibre vouched for by Charlie Luke – is doing in a place like Lindsay sniffing around some fairly low-level unpleasantness. Not your scene at all, I would have said.’

  ‘I am not quite sure whether I shoulder be flattered by that, but I will be and I will cheerfully admit that it was Superintendent Luke’s descriptions of odd goings-on and Nine Day Wonders that got the nose of this old truffle hound pointed towards Lindsay Carfax. The minor mayhem which has occurred there since is probably of little consequence.’

  ‘Little consequence?’ interrupted an indignant Miss Fitton. ‘I could have broken my neck on those blasted stairs!’

  ‘Or Ben Judd could have,’ said Campion softly then turned back to address the policeman. ‘And there are other odd things happening. The school master there, Lemuel Walker, who recently went on a nine-day disappearing trick, is back safe and mostly sound, but the man is terrified of his own shadow. Whatever happened to him scared him to the marrow.’

  ‘Highly strung,’ said Bill Bailey gruffly, ‘that’s his problem; far too highly strung to be a teacher if you ask me. We know all about him.’

  ‘He was reported as a Missing Person?’

  ‘Matter of fact he wasn’t, least not by his nearest and dearest, if you count his landlady as the nearest to a dearest he’s got.’

  ‘The redoubtable Mrs Thornton. Yes, I’ve met her.’

  ‘It was only after he was back in circulation that we heard about it. One of the lads stationed at Long Melford was taking his wife out for their wedding anniversary dinner and no village bobby likes to come across as the loving husband when he’s on his own patch, so he took his missus over to Lindsay for scampi and chips in the basket, or whatever it is they serve in the Woolpack. Turns out that the most popular dish on the menu there is gossip and our chap kept his ears open and when I got his report I sent one of my detectives out to interview the wandering Mr Walker, but that turned out to be a waste of petrol. He just didn’t want to talk. He certainly wasn’t prepared to press charges against anybody and, as he hadn’t asked for us to be involved, I couldn’t even do him for wasting police time.’

  ‘But there was a Nine Days’ Wonder last year which wasn’t a waste of police time, wasn’t there?’ Campion asked quietly, as if the thought had just occurred to him.

  ‘You mean the two hippies who died?’ Bill Bailey pursed his lips.

  ‘They called them ‘lieabouts’ in the village,’ offered Eliza, ‘or sometimes ‘the great unwashed’, but I think they were just young people looking to enjoy themselves during the summer. I don’t think they were hippies really, you know, not like in San Francisco, living in communes with flowers in their hair and free love and drugs.’

  ‘There were plenty of drugs, I suspect,’ Mr Bailey pronounced gravely. ‘In fact it was the drugs that killed two of them and put three others in hospital. I can’t speak as to the flowers and the free love, but I tend to agree with you, Miss, they weren’t hippies; leastways not the ones who died. They were students, from respectable families as well. I know; I had to break the news to their mothers and fathers.’

  ‘Students? Local ones?’ Campion’s tone was casual, but concerned.

  ‘Cambridge men – well, boys, really. Archaeologists out there on a dig that summer. They’d been camping out there minding their own business for a couple of weeks and nobody noticed them until some of the peace-and-love brigade spotted their tents and thought it would be a good place to lie up for the summer. Somehow, God knows how – jungle drums probably – the word got round that some sort of event, a “happening” they call it, was … well, happening and they started turning up from all over the place in clapped out old cars, on bikes and scooters, even a couple of gypsy caravan and an ancient charabanc.’

  The policeman slowly shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘And that’s when we started to get complaints from the great and good of Lindsay Carfax. Not about the drug-taking – which even that mop-headed vicar disapproved of – or the promiscuity, as it seems you really have to go some to outrage public decency in Lindsay Carfax. No, the biggest moans came from the café-owners and the souvenir shops and those picture galleries who complained that the incomers were putting off their regular tourist trade and not spending any money on knick-knacks. I don’t recall the Woolpack complaining, come to think of it, as I reckon they did a roaring trade from the Four Ale Bar of take-away bottles of brown ale and barley wine.’

  Mr Campion sneaked a sly glance at Eliza Jane and allowed himself a secret smile as she shuffled her feet in embarrassment.

  ‘I had only just arrived in the village,’ she said defensively, ‘and the hippies I saw seemed harmless. A bit grubby perhaps, and they liked their transistors turned up loud, but they were friendly enough.’

  ‘You’d be nearer to them in age than the average resident, I expect,’ observed Bill Bailey, ‘and naturally a bit more tolerant of their morals. I know for a fact that some in the village were positively gleeful when they descended on the place – that daft vicar for one, and that wandering schoolmaster for another.’

  ‘Lemuel Walker sided with the invading lieabouts?’ Mr Campion said with mock horror. ‘Whatever next? Putting the welcome mat out for Genghis Khan and his marauding Mongols?’

  Bill Bailey narrowed his eyes and studied his visitor.

  ‘Charlie Luke said you were a card. Didn’t tell me you were the whole pack. Anyway, as I was saying, there were those who thought the hippies were a plague and others who didn’t seem to mind them, like your schoolteacher chum. He was all for encouraging the archaeologists at first, but when they started overdosing on the drugs, then your Mr Walker ran a mile, just didn’t want to know. Odd, really, because by all accounts he was an old chum of their supervisor or tutor or whatever they call the head man at Cambridge, but when the deaths occurred it was yours truly here who had to go a break the news.’

  ‘Do you remember the name of their tutor?’

  ‘Dr Mortimer Casson, of St Ignatius College.’

  ‘Good Heavens, that’s my old stomping ground!’ exclaimed Campion.

  ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me?’ sighed Bailey. ‘I suppose you know this Dr Casson personally – have sherry with him regularly or dine with him at High Table, or partner him at a May Ball, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Actually I’ve never heard of him. Almost certainly wasn’t born when I was swotting for my finals. Do I detect a note of antagonism towards Cambridge men?’

  ‘Not at all, or at least no more than you’d expect from a Redbrick man, it just stuck in my gullet the way Dr Casson was when I broke the news that his students had died.’

  ‘He was upset, of course, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, he was upset they were dead. That was genuine enough. But when I told him it was drugs as the cause, he just sat there and shrugged in a “What can you do” sort of gesture. He wasn’t shocked, not even surprised; just seemed to accept that students and LSD went together like ham and pickles, as we say round here. To him, drugs seemed to be part of life these days – and that’s what got me about him, the casual way he accepted his students signed their own death warrants. Drug overdose? Just one of the risks of being young these days. I mean the youth of today has to question everything, don’t they? Have to try everything, even if it kills them.’

  Eliza Jane, Campi
on noticed, was earnestly studying the toes of her suede shoes, determined not to become involved in any diatribe on the younger generation.

  ‘LSD you say? I’m no expert, but I thought ‘acid’ was a powerful hallucinogen and not a fatal drug like some of the others can be. Of course you can go ‘tripping’ and think you can fly and kill yourself by jumping off a bridge or such like, but I wasn’t aware there was a lethal dose per se.’

  ‘That’s what the flower power people and the free thinkers would want you to believe,’ said Bill Bailey with steel in his voice, ‘but too much of anything can kill you, even the sugar in your tea, I reckon. Like you, Mr Campion, I don’t know much about drugs, though I’ve got a nasty feeling that like most policemen I’m going to have to get better educated on the subject over the next few years. I’m going on what the pathologist told the coroner: the two fatalities ingested very pure, undiluted LSD in a massive quantity. Now normally, one fluid ounce of the stuff can make 30,000 doses or ‘tabs’ as the hippies call them. We don’t know for sure, but the boffins in the laboratories think the two archaeologists took doses over eighty times larger than normal – if there’s anything normal about getting out of your mind like that.’

  ‘And you’re sure it was self-administered?’

  ‘Looking for foul play? I thought that was my job. In fact, last time I looked it was and I take my job seriously, Campion. In my opinion, whoever supplied the LSD to those lads is guilty of murder – guilty as hell. But we don’t know who that was and it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever find him. As to the administering of the drug, I’m afraid that was self-inflicted.’

  ‘There is no doubt of that?’ Campion probed.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ the detective sighed and slumped visibly in his chair as he told the story.

  ‘There were five of them – the archaeology students from Cambridge – and they were camped out at a place called Saxon Mills for the summer, quietly minding their own business before the hippy invasion. The must have got mixed up in this ‘alternative lifestyle’ they’re always on about, because none of them had a track record of drugs before last summer. Somehow they got hold of some LSD and decided to go on an acid trip one night. Two of them never saw the morning and the three that did saw it from a hospital bed.’