Margery Allingham's Mr Campion's Farewell

by Mike Ripley

  ‘I wouldn’t say Miss Fitton struck me as highly-strung, sir, or particularly temperamental,’ Bailey observed seriously.

  ‘Of course she isn’t,’ said Campion, ‘but she is an artist, which allows me to make sweeping generalisations. I take it that when Eliza Jane said “cursed” she didn’t mean literally, in the sense of involving eyes of newt and tongues of frogs, numerous witches and a cat buried under the doorstep …’

  Detective Chief Inspector Bailey sighed loudly.

  ‘No, sir, not a curse as in black magic or what-have-you, she just meant an unlucky place. And by the way, sir, the old Suffolk custom of burying a dead cat under the front doorstep was supposed to keep witches and curses out of the family home.’

  ‘I think I knew that,’ said Mr Campion, chastised by the policeman’s proud Suffolk glare, ‘and I certainly did not mean to offend. That’s the trouble with this Cambridge air; it frees the brain but also loosens the tongue. I will be quiet. Persevero perpetuus, as they say around here; though not very often.’

  Mr Bailey chose to steer the safest course in the conversation by ignoring Mr Campion in the way only seasoned policeman can ignore someone sitting in the same room less than an arm’s length away; that is to say, both politely and completely.

  ‘Miss Fitton brought to our attention the fact that the quarry pit known as Saxon Mills has been the scene of some unfortunate incidents in the past. Last year, as you know, there were two drug-related deaths of young men, archaeology students, who had been camping out at Saxon Mills.’

  ‘But I believe you told us their bodies had been found in a local barn,’ said a suddenly serious Campion.

  ‘I did, and they were; but Miss Fitton was referring to an earlier incident – much earlier – when a body was found there back in 1937.’

  ‘But good heavens, my dear chap, Eliza Jane wasn’t even a twinkle in her father’s eye back in 1937.’

  ‘I do realise that, sir,’ said Bailey patiently. ‘Miss Fitton was referring to something she’d been told, about how a chap called Johnnie Sirrah had been found in the bottom of that gravel pit with his neck broken, just about where you ended up.’

  ‘Then it is a cursed place indeed,’ said Campion, ‘and explains something Charlie Luke said at the outset of this business; that something had happened at Lindsay Carfax over thirty years ago which he would have treated as murder if he had been on the spot. Who was this Johnnie Sirrah fellow?’

  ‘Can’t say we know very much about him, not at this remove, but I dug out the paperwork, such as it was, on the case. It was treated as a suspicious death to begin with but the coroner eventually settled on death by misadventure given that the late Mr Sirrah was found with an almost empty half-bottle of Scotch in one jacket pocket and a full half-bottle in the other.’

  ‘The theory being what? That he was out for a drunken stagger across a ploughed field and went head-first into a gaping quarry, bouncing all the way to the bottom just like I did?’

  ‘Something like that, sir, yes.’

  ‘And his tumbling act broke his neck but did not damage either of the bottles he was carrying? I’m impressed. I must try and incorporate that trick into my cheapjack carnival routine.’

  Bill Bailey cleared his throat.

  ‘Be that as it may, sir, there seems to have been enough circumstantial evidence, or gossip if you prefer, that Mr Sirrah was a bit of a dedicated reveller and fond of the odd night of heavy boozing. He had a touch of form, as we’d say these days, mostly for drunk and disorderly or causing a public nuisance but he was forgiven a lot by the Magistrates he came up against.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Well he had what the papers called ‘film-star looks’ for one thing and had appeared in revue in the West End I believe, so he could put on a good show and probably scrubbed up well. He fancied himself as a literary man and even tried his hand at poetry. He was also a bit of a hero, having been one of the first to volunteer to go and fight Franco’s fascists in 1936, though he earned his portion of glory as a stretcher-bearer under fire during the attack on Madrid. That made him a real heartthrob among the ladies but the experience turned him well to the left and also did for his nerves. Understandable really, he was still pretty young.

  ‘He came back to England in ’37 and took a cottage in Lindsay Carfax to rest and recuperate and found himself a girlfriend, though that didn’t stop him taking up various causes: pro-trades unionism, anti-fox hunting; anti-Nazi, obviously, but pro-independence for India. Wrote a letter a week to The Times, including one quite famous one marked for the attention of Mr Winston Churchill, which basically said: Dear Winston, you’re wrong about Gandhi but dead right about Hitler.

  ‘A bright lad by all accounts and always ready to get involved in causes, lost or otherwise, but then he just disappeared one night and turned up dead nine days later in the gravel pit.’

  ‘Nine days, eh? I bet the Carders claimed the credit for that,’ said Campion.

  ‘If there was any credit going, they would have,’ Bill Bailey agreed, ‘just as they would have avoided any blame.’

  ‘And the police investigation?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me, I’m happy – but not proud – to say. It started as a Missing Persons case and for a while was considered as a Suspicious Death but once the coroner decided it was almost certainly accidental with drink involved, that more or less put it to bed and nobody gave the case much of a thought until you took your dive into the quarry and ended up almost exactly where Johnnie Sirrah did.’

  Mr Campion stroked his chin thoughtfully.

  ‘In your dusty police files, was there by any chance a note of who reported Johnnie Sirrah missing?’

  ‘Matter of fact there was: it was Mrs Clarissa Webster who I believe is a friend of your niece. Back then, of course, she was Clarissa Pinner and she was the girlfriend Sirrah had found in Lindsay Carfax.’

  If he had ever given the subject much thought, which he had not, Mr Campion’s ideal archaeologist would have been a tall, muscular, sun-bronzed figure; a man of military bearing, with a pencil dark moustache and gleaming teeth, dressed in jodhpurs, riding boots and pith helmet. He would be fluent in at least a dozen languages – ancient and modern – of the Middle East, and be accompanied everywhere by a fiercely loyal Sikh manservant with a ruby in his turban and several curved daggers concealed about his person. He would be the sort of man who was fatherly to his army of native diggers and who would not give a fig for a Pharaoh’s curse.

  Dr Mortimer Casson, however, was short, skinny to the point of emaciation and had buck teeth which made him lisp when he spoke. His hair was unkempt, unwashed and unruly and Campion thought he still detected boyish curls which had survived what were clearly Dr Casson’s attempts at self-barbering. At least, Mr Campion hoped the haircut has been self-inflicted; if it had been paid for, it had been a fee extorted under false pretences.

  The young Dr Casson, for Campion quickly catalogued him within Eliza Jane’s generation, did not look like the sort of archaeologist who would fearlessly force his way into the bowels of a pyramid or hack through jungle to find Aztec gold; in fact he looked like the sort of pale, wan and strangely loitering schoolboy who always volunteered to stay in the pavilion and do the scoring at cricket matches. Yet the Master of St Ignatius had described him as ‘a coming mind’ in his field and despite the tragedy of the previous year would be just the man to answer Campion’s questions on the history and folklore of Lindsay Carfax. Campion had not, naturally, informed the Master that his main interest in interviewing Dr Casson was far from archaeological and did indeed concern the recent tragedy which had befallen his students.

  ‘Come in and make yourself comfortable among the chaos, if you can,’ Dr Casson had greeted him when Mr Campion had called on him and on entering the archaeologist’s college rooms, he realised it had not been an empty threat.

  Campion was sure there was a desk somewhere in the room but it took him several minutes to ascertain its
outline, surrounded as it was by piled wooden beer crates bearing the name Bullards or Steward and Patteson, a variety of metal tools and implements leaning against it and the floor leading to it seeded with a minefield of metal buckets full of trowels, brushes and hand-tools which looked medieval but were probably of garden origin.

  As though adjusting his eyesight to rapidly-falling dusk, Campion reassured himself that the beer crates were full of pottery shards, the military ranks of weapons standing, or leaning, to attention were shovels, hoes, mattocks, a folded metal tripod, a collapsed wooden ranging staff and the buckets, trowels, brushes, scrapers and forking tools of torture were all, in fact, legitimate equipment for the practising archaeologist about town. It was just that he had never seen so much of it in such a confined space before.

  ‘Sorry about the mess, but there is a chair in here somewhere,’ Dr Casson promised. ‘I have to keep all this equipment here so I can keep an eye on it. We lock our wheelbarrows in the groundsman’s shed but you’d be surprised how much goes missing.’

  ‘Student pranks, I suppose,’ said Campion.

  ‘No, Dons with wives who’ve taken to gardening, I’m afraid,’ admitted Casson. ‘I’ve even caught one walking off with a bucket full of tesserae thinking they would make a nice surround for a rose bush. Ah, here we are.’

  The younger man had ploughed his way through the clutter and lifted a pile of books and papers in both arms to reveal a small wooden chair. Unceremoniously he dropped his burden to the floor and a cloud of fine dust rose around him to waist height.

  ‘You sit here; I’ll perch on the edge of the desk.’ Casson snorted a laugh. ‘If I can find it, that is!’

  ‘As an archaeologist, I’m sure you are very proficient at digging up things long buried,’ Campion said jovially as Casson cleared the desk top of papers, notebooks and large sheets of tracing-paper plans and maps by scooping them up by the arm-full and depositing them casually wherever they fell. It reminded Campion of a man frantically trying to bail out a sinking rowing boat with a colander.

  Eventually Dr Casson decided he had cleared sufficient space at one corner and settled his rump there but as he had made no attempt to clear away the long-handled tools leaning against the edge of the desk, only his head was clearly visible to his visitor, giving the impression that he was peering over some rude battlement or ancient wooden fortification which, Mr Campion thought, was probably quite an apt state of affairs for an archaeologist.

  ‘Now what can I do for you, Professor Campion?’

  ‘You flatter me, Dr Casson. I am not a professor and the only chair I hold is the one I am sitting upon temporarily.’

  ‘But the Master described you as a Distinguished Visitor …’

  ‘You clearly heard capital letters where none were intended, or indeed deserved. I like to think I may be distinguished in some things, though none of them have any bearing on our meeting today, but I am only a visitor to Cambridge in a general sense, though now I am here I simply had to see you.’

  ‘Me? What have I done?’

  ‘Nothing illegal, as far as I know,’ said Campion affably, ‘but I was hoping you could help me.’

  ‘With what?’ Dr Casson remained outwardly calm, but his voice had risen a tone.

  ‘About what happened at Lindsay Carfax.’

  ‘Oh, Christus, not again. I wish I’d never heard of that damned place.’

  ‘I appreciate you must have been asked before …’

  ‘By the police, by the Dean, by the Faculty, by the press, by the parents … the parents, that was the worst.’

  ‘The parents of the two students who died?’ Campion prompted gently.

  Dr Casson nodded his drooping head.

  ‘Stephen Stotter and Martin Rees – both of them good guys and good diggers – and neither deserved what happened to them.’

  ‘Can you tell me the background to their deaths? I assure you I do not ask out of morbid curiosity, but I do have an interest in things unexplained in Lindsay Carfax.’ As if on cue, Mr Campion felt a twinge in his thigh which was still tender after the ministrations of Addenbrooke’s surgeons. ‘In fact you might say I have a vested interest in events there which may or may not be connected.’

  ‘Connected? Steve and Marty died a year ago.’

  ‘I get the feeling that some things fester in Lindsay Carfax for far longer than a year,’ said Campion soberly. ‘I think that what happened to your students could be just one piece of a rather strange jigsaw puzzle. I would greatly appreciate it if you could tell me what happened.’

  ‘Very well, as long as I don’t have to go to that awful place myself I don’t suppose it can do any harm – or any more harm – and the Master has told me I should assist you, so I suppose I must.’ Dr Casson’s hands plunged into the pockets of his jacket and he produced a pack of cigarettes and a cheap French stick lighter. Nervously he lit a cigarette and was returning the pack to his pocket when he seemed to remember his manners. ‘Oh, sorry; did you want a gasper?’

  ‘No thank you. My doctor told me I could extend my life if I stopped smoking and my wife guaranteed me the opposite if I did not.’

  ‘We all have our vices,’ said Casson, rather primly.

  ‘We do indeed,’ agreed Mr Campion, ‘and mine is curiosity. I am keen to know why you dispatched your diggers to Lindsay Carfax in the first place.’

  Dr Casson wearily exhaled a cloud of smoke.

  ‘Saxon Mills seemed like the ideal place for the usual training dig for first year undergrads. It should have been. It was not a difficult site archaeologically, it wasn’t that far away and it was a safe place to dig.’

  ‘Safe?’ Campion queried.

  ‘The site was on agricultural land, away from busy roads, fast-flowing water and falling rocks, that sort of thing, though of course the place didn’t turn out to be safe for Steve and Marty.’

  ‘What were they expecting to find there?’

  ‘Frankly, nothing we did not already know was there, which that is to say nothing much. The name Saxon Mills goes back to Domesday but if there ever was actually a mill there, it was probably long gone by the time the land was given to the monks of Lindsay Carfax so they could build an abbey. Along came Henry VIII with his Reformation and bang went the abbey – probably quite literally. Most of the stone would have been robbed to use in buildings elsewhere and quarrying in the 19th century finished the job, but there are still traces of the place if you know where and how to look for them. As I say, a perfect place for a training dig; no difficult stratification, no complex plans to draw, and the chance to practice digging and recording small features with little risk of damaging anything archaeologically important. There was also the chance of small finds, mostly pottery but perhaps a coin or a metal spoon, which is always good for morale and keeps the diggers keen.’

  ‘And you were supervising them?’

  ‘In Cambridge I was their academic supervisor, but out at Saxon Mills, Steve Stotter was the site supervisor.’

  ‘A first-year undergraduate?’ Campion failed to suppress the surprise in his voice.

  ‘That’s perfectly usual on a training dig in this country and at Cambridge we believe in giving our students responsibility. In any case, Steve had been going on digs since he was a schoolboy. He was a natural at it.’

  ‘And he was in charge of …?’

  ‘There were four others, all first-years, but they were level-headed and I had complete faith in all of them – as diggers, that is.’

  Dr Casson stared mournfully at his knees for a moment, then at the cigarette in his hand and then he began casting around for somewhere to extinguish it, finally deciding on a metal bucket which bloomed with trowels and metal hand-shovels.

  ‘Just out of interest,’ Campion asked, ‘did they find anything?’

  ‘Not a sausage – well not a sausage of any interest. They even went over the entire site with the mine detector.’

  ‘Mine detector?’

  ‘That’s w
hat the policeman who returned it called it. He gave me quite a lecture on how he’d used one at El Alamein or somewhere and couldn’t understand why we should have one with Property of St Ignatius College stamped on it. It’s a metal detector of course, but it works on much the same principles as the old wartime ones; in fact the detector and the telescopic level were just about the only bits of equipment we got back. Of course metal detecting on site is frowned upon by the purists, but archaeologists have been using them since 1929 when Mussolini ordered the excavation of Caligula’s Imperial sailing barges from the bottom of Lake Nemi.’

  ‘But no Imperial metals detected at Saxon Mills, I suppose?’

  ‘Ha-bloody-hah!’ Casson scoffed loudly. ‘Fat chance! The only thing they found – and very carefully excavated – was a starting handle!’

  Mr Campion raised an eyebrow.

  ‘So would that be a Saxon, or a Tudor, starting handle?’

  ‘Oh never fear, we did all the jokes. It turned out to be the starting handle from a 1935 Austin 7. Several of the older Dons identified it straight away. Some of them are still driving their Austin 7s with pride and all of them seemed to have owned one at one time.’

  ‘So the dig was not a success?’

  ‘As a training exercise it seemed to be going very well, and then the hippies turned up and things got out of hand. That’s when it turned into a disaster.’

  Campion felt a wave of sympathy for the young archaeologist, for it was clear that conjuring memories of Saxon Mills was distressing him.

  ‘Would you tell me what happened?’

  Dr Casson fumbled for another cigarette and when he could hide behind a cloud of exhaled smoke he said:

  ‘As much as I can. I wasn’t there of course, not after the first day. I drove them over to Lindsay Carfax in one of the college vans with their gear. It was almost as if they were going on a camping holiday; they were all singing and cracking jokes in the back of the van – couldn’t have been happier. We were met at Long Tye Farm and we unloaded …’

  ‘Met by whom?’ Campion interrupted gently.