Margery Allingham's Mr Campion's Farewell

by Mike Ripley

  Using the torches together as the headlights of a car, they illuminated the dry, dusty interior, sweeping the beams over a seemingly random collection of old agricultural tools, empty fertilizer sacks, unidentifiable bits of machinery, oil drums, empty and crushed petrol cans, lengths of rusting chain and saw blades, thick piles of damp and curling copies of Farmer’s Weekly bound up with baling twine and any number of old tyres orphaned from their wheels. A blackened oak work bench complete with rusting vices stood against one wall and above it was fixed a tool rack with a displaying a fearsome arsenal of chisels, files, hand-saws and planes, all coated in cobwebs and a thick layer of rusty dust. Mr Campion suspected that the scene before them could be replicated in a thousand rural outbuildings in Suffolk, let alone the rest of the country.

  ‘This is just junk,’ said Judd. ‘What exactly are we supposed to be looking for?’

  ‘Something which may look like junk, but isn’t.’

  ‘That’s not very helpful, old boy. Can’t you be a bit more specific?’

  ‘Canvas tents, camping stoves, sleeping bags, buckets, trowels, mattocks and what will look like a long piece of wood about three or four inches wide with numbers painted on it and metal clamps on the side.’

  Judd grunted as if disgusted with the whole business but handed Campion his torch and set to with a noisy will, pulling aside an empty oil drum, some tyres and what appeared to be an ancient tea-chest stuffed with oil-soaked shreds of wool ‘shoddy’ – the waste product of the woollen trade put to use to mop up the oil spillages of a modern garage. Even the rubbish in Lindsay Carfax, Campion thought, was connected to the wool trade.

  ‘Is this the sort of thing you’re after?’ Judd asked, manhandling a large painted metal sign advertising Shell petrol out of the way to reveal a pile of canvas and cloth weighted down with buckets and three mattocks. ‘They look like tents and from the smell something’s living in them right now. Want me to pull them out?’

  ‘No,’ said Campion, directing the two torches beyond the heap, ‘don’t disturb the local wildlife. That’s what we’re after.’

  ‘I still don’t know what the hell that is, or why you wanted it.’

  It had taken Ben only a few minutes to re-screw the hasp of the lock to the door so that it appeared that the barn remained securely locked and un-violated and now he and Campion stood at the foot of the outside staircase which ran up the side of his studio. Ben held the torches and shone them full on to a blinking Campion who held the curious length of white wood with numbered gradations in both hands, as if he were holding a rifle at ‘port arms’.

  ‘When the two archaeologists died here last summer, all their gear was moved from Saxon Mills and stored in that barn, which I presume is owned by Mr Marchant.’

  ‘Fuller,’ corrected Judd with distaste. ‘That old pedant Fuller owns most of the village; at least it was the Fullers I bought my place off.’

  ‘It probably doesn’t matter,’ said Campion. ‘My point is that the only two items of equipment which were returned to the university were the metal detector and the level used to record the depths of any archaeological features. But to take levels, you need a staff with the heights marked on. One chap looks through the sight on the level – a bit like a surveyor’s theodolite – whilst the unlucky one climbs into a pit or a ditch and holds this levelling staff up until his mate gets a reading from these numbers painted on the face.’

  Judd blew air from inflated cheeks and shook his head.

  ‘Call me thick, Campion, but you’ve lost me.’

  Mr Campion smiled and the torchlight caught the twinkle in his eyes.

  ‘Allow me to demonstrate.’

  With the dexterity of a stage magician, Campion began to extend the staff by pulling out the sections, each new section slightly thinner than the previous snapping into place like the ‘pulls’ of a telescope, until he was struggling to hold a narrowing wooden pole over twelve feet in length. With less dexterity, he adjusted his feet and carefully swung the staff in an arc over Ben’s head until he was positioned at the foot of the studio’s external staircase with the staff held out before him like a jousting lance.

  ‘Lights,’ said Campion and Judd raised the torches to light the staircase, ‘camera, action!’

  The torch beams followed the tip of the staff as Campion slowly raised it up and strained to hold it steady with arms outstretched until the end was positioned in the centre of the door to Judd’s living quarters. When satisfied he was in position, he swung the staff out from the door and then returned it, producing a series of short raps in a Da-Da-DaDa pattern.

  ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ said Judd, ‘that’s how he did it! How did you figure that out?’

  ‘An educated guess,’ said Mr Campion, lowering the staff and laying it flat on the ground. ‘And if one cannot have educated guesses in Cambridge, where can one? I guessed it must be here somewhere and a policeman told me that when the bodies of the poor students had been removed, their things had been brought to this barn where they died and no one had thought to collect them. An extendable levelling staff struck me as the ideal way to knock on a door high up in the air and run away before it opened.’

  ‘Leaving a nasty little booby trap which could have broken Liza’s neck.’ As Judd spoke, the torch beams wavered in his shaking hands.

  ‘I think it was meant for you, not Eliza Jane,’ said Campion.

  ‘It was Tommy-Bloody-Tucker, wasn’t it? He’s the only person who uses that barn, calls it his workshop. It’s where he knocks out fake Humble Boxes for Clarissa Webster.’ Judd was breathing deeply and loudly, his hand shaking even more, making the torchlight dance. ‘By God, if he was here now I’d make him answer for it!’

  ‘I think young Mr Tucker has more to answer for than an unrequited infatuation with my niece, but that has served a purpose tonight.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ snapped Judd.

  ‘I wanted Tommy out of the way tonight, so we could do our burglary. Eliza Jane agreed to be our decoy. She’s keeping an eagle eye on all the Carders down at the Woolpack where they are all having a jolly good think about their future, I hope.’

  ‘Tucker is with Liza? Now?’

  ‘It’s not as if she’s alone with him and I doubt if the atmosphere is even remotely conducive to …’

  But Ben Judd had turned on his heels and was charging down the lane, bellowing like a wounded stag, the two torches he still held weaving insane patterns of light and shadow to each side of his body, giving his disappearing figure an unearthly outline.

  Mr Campion threw down the levelling staff and set off in pursuit, knowing that it was hopeless.

  If he had been forty years younger and as fit as he had been when he went up to Cambridge as an undergraduate, Campion doubted he could have caught the rampaging figure of Ben Judd. As a man of advancing (if not ‘pipe and slippers’ just yet) years who had recently had a handful of shotgun pellets removed from his leg and thigh, he would be lucky to keep him in sight. Only the dread thought that he would be responsible for what would inevitably happen spurred him on. Lugg had been right not to trust Judd – Lugg, of all people! Lugg had spotted that Judd ‘could start a fight in a confessional’ and now Campion had pointed him in the right direction and lit the blue touch paper.

  By the time he reached the end of the lane by Sherman’s Garage, Ben Judd was pounding up the slope of the High Street and half way to the Carders’ Hall. His chest already heaving and his right leg burning with pain, Campion set off in pursuit, realising that he had left his walking stick behind outside Judd’s studio. Not that it would have been of much use at the hobbling pace he was trying to maintain. He even thought of throwing away the camera case which swung wildly around his neck from its leather strap, determined to strangle him.

  Bizarrely, Judd still held a lit torch in each hand, the beams flashing out to either side of his running figure like the navigation lights on the wing-tips of an aircraft. As he dashed on, the effect of t
he light flickering across the frontage of The Medley and then the Prentice House reminded Campion – still some distance behind and breathing heavily – of the opening titles of a Hammer horror biography of Jack the Ripper. And then Judd’s spectral figure disappeared as he rounded the curve of the Carders’ Hall, leaving only a shard of torchlight like a silent flash of lightning in the night.

  Campion slowed his stumbling pace to a more dignified walk, fumbled for his handkerchief and mopped his brow, then with a loud sigh continued his fruitless pursuit.

  He knew he was going to be too late. He was a man who could no longer keep up with his allies, let alone chase his enemies.

  He was too slow.

  He was too old.

  ‘He’ll pay for any damage!’

  Campion’s ears recognised Eliza Jane’s voice as soon as he pushed open the door to the bar of the Woolpack, but the scene which met his astonished eyes was anything but familiar.

  Tables, bar stools and chairs had been overturned; angular wooden bodies on a battlefield. Glasses and bottles had been smashed. A wall-mounted light fitting dangled from its wire. The floor was awash with spilled drink in which ice cubes twinkled frostily and upturned plastic ashtrays floated like small but menacing icebergs which left a trail of cigarette stubs and grey ash in their wake. Yet the physical disarray of the room was only half as shocking as the state of its human inhabitants. Both furniture and people resembled a living museum exhibit showing Londoners in the immediate aftermath of an air raid during the Blitz.

  Campion did a quick head count. All the people he had left in the bar were still present, though in a considerably dishevelled state. Clarissa Webster, clutching a broken string of cosmetic pearls to her throat in a futile attempt to stop them dripping off her to bounce on the floor and roll away among the flotsam, was being comforted in the embracing arms of Gus Marchant. The pair of them leaned against the far wall underneath the obligatory print of Constable’s Haywain which had been disturbed by the recent hurricane and now hung at a precarious angle. With only a fleeting glance, Campion registered that Mrs Webster was clutching her protector perhaps closer than was absolutely necessary to her ample bosom and had made no attempt to correct the hemline of her dress which had risen above the knee by the currently fashionable four inches, although usually on much younger women. She seemed uninjured and in no immediate danger of swooning; or at least unintentionally.

  The others in the room showed definite signs of distress.

  The shrivelled figure of Marcus Fuller looked the frailest of them all, even though he had adopted the role of nursing angel – or perhaps combat surgeon – and was ministering to his brother, who was seated in one of the few chairs still upright, his legs splayed out in front of him, holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to a split lip and nursing his left arm across his chest.

  Dennis Sherman was similarly providing first aid to the battered and dishevelled figure of Tommy Tucker who was slumped, his eyes closed, on the floor his back to the wall. His shirtfront had been pulled open, revealing a distinctly grubby string vest on to which blood was dripping from his bleeding nose and dark bruises were already forming on his forehead and upper cheek bones. He would, thought Campion, be sporting one if not two black eyes come the morning.

  The stick-like Hereward Spindler was leaning with both forearms propped on the bar. In other circumstances he could have resembled an over-familiar, and over-relaxed, customer seeking to confide in the barman were it not for the fact that his legs – in fact his whole body – was quivering with shock and fright. On the professional side of the bar Don was doing what professional barmen do and providing his own brand of solace and medication, or in this case, a well-known brand of cognac, which he was offering towards Spindler’s open mouth in a large balloon glass.

  Centre stage, however, was the tableau on the floor, directly in front of the bar. It wasn’t exactly a pose plastique as there was movement in the scene: an empty ice bucket and an empty bottle of Barsac rolled across the floor before finally coming to rest against the main display, the inert figure of Ben Judd lying prone on the floor, parallel to the bar in the place where, in several venerable London pubs of Campion’s acquaintance, there would be a sturdy brass foot rail.

  Ben Judd’s body was not being used for the support of a brown brogue or a black boot, though. Rather, his muscular frame had been pressed into service as some sort of ad hoc chaise longue by Eliza Jane, who sat imperiously on his shoulders, one arm behind her pressing his head face-first into the floor, her legs stretched down his back, occasionally using her high-heeled shoes as spurs into his flanks.

  ‘He’ll pay for any damage!’ she said again.

  Those involved in or who had witnessed the events in the Woolpack bar were divided on what to do with Ben Judd, and it was as if Campion’s arrival was a cue for them to make a decision despite Mr Campion not having said a word.

  Hereward Spindler was, true to his profession, a stickler when it came to others adhering to the letter of the law citing assault, battery, wilful destruction of property and disturbing the peace as preliminary grounds for calling the police. Both Fullers agreed completely with the solicitor’s analysis, Marcus Fuller stating that the maniac should be locked up but Simon going further and suggesting he be given a good sound beating before cell doors were slammed and keys thrown away. Clarissa Webster, between bosom-heaving sobs (which seemed to grow in the heaving department with the presence of Mr Campion), declared that the ‘poor boy’ should not be judged too harshly, for his judgement had been clouded by the green-eyed demon of jealousy, which happens when a man is in love.

  Gus Marchant, trying to support that heaving bosom and at the same time establish his authority, declared that not even a lovesick rogue elephant would behave as badly and thuggish violence needed to be nipped in the bud; or in this case, as soon as possible. The police should be called immediately, if Don would be so kind. Don, respecting the wishes of the owner of the Woolpack who was de facto, his employer, agreed to do so with alacrity.

  It was only when Mr Campion, speaking for the first time, suggested that as Simon Fuller seemed to be nursing a broken arm and Tommy Tucker could well be suffering from concussion, perhaps the first 999 request by Don should be for an ambulance. There was a short, embarrassed silence followed by a begrudging but general murmur of agreement and Don, after receiving an encouraging nod from Gus Marchant, dissolved from the bar in the way only experienced barmen can.

  ‘Whilst we await the arrival of the emergency services,’ said Campion calmly, ‘might I suggest that we retire to the dining room and persuade Don to serve us drinks in there?’

  With care he stepped over broken glass and ice cubes, his shoes making squelching noises in the sodden carpet. Then, with the smooth skill of a gunfighter, he drew his Olympus Trip from the case hanging round his neck and as the assemble crowd watched in amazement, he coolly took the flash attachment form his pocket and shoehorned it on to the camera.

  Bending slightly at the knees, as he had seen fashion photographers do in arty films, he took three flash pictures in rapid succession of his niece (who actually smiled sweetly into the lens) sitting astride her felled lover.

  ‘Now that I have photographic evidence of Mr Judd’s rather embarrassing predicament, I am sure it is safe to allow him to regain his dignity, Eliza.’

  He held out a hand which the girl took and pulled herself upright, carefully placing her feet on the floor rather than Ben Judd, who let out a loud moan of relief.

  ‘If Mr Judd promises to remain silent – by which I mean that he says not one word – then he may join us in the dining room if he sits quietly in a corner. Alternatively, he could bolt for the door and escape into the night, in which case we would all co-operate in the hue-and-cry which the police would no doubt initiate. I do not think he would get far and it would add another charge to his growing list of indictments.’

  Campion looked around the wrecked bar. He did not need a police enquiry
to tell him what had happened. The enraged Ben Judd has burst in to see his beloved Eliza Jane seemingly in flirtatious mode with the despised Tommy Tucker; behaviour which was being accepted, if not actively encouraged, by the great and good of Lindsay Carfax, in fact the very hierarchy of the Carders he so disdained. He had no doubt bellowed something obscene and threatening in a fairly accurate impersonation of a bull seal protecting his harem at which point Simon Fuller, Campion guessed, had stepped forward to remonstrate with him and perhaps it was then that the furniture had started to go over.

  Judd had lashed out at anything which stood between him and his imagined rival in love and had probably forgotten that he still gripped a heavy torch in each hand. Thus his swinging blows had caused far more damage than his bare fists would have, resulting in broken bones and broken heads.

  In the general melee, which would have been messier, quicker and far less dramatic than an over-choreographed saloon fight in a Hollywood western, Judd had been stopped in his tracks before homicide could be committed and somehow laid low.

  Eliza Jane was later to cheerfully admit to the attending police officers: ‘Oh that would have been me. I smashed him round the head with the ice bucket. When he’s in that sort of mood, it’s the only way of reasoning with him.’

  ‘The Great Woolpack Brawl’ as it would become known in local legend, was investigated by the local police force of Sergeant James and PC Wilson, both of solid Suffolk stock. Their arrival coincided with that of an ambulance and so the forces of law, order and medicine combined to restore order to chaos.

  Statements were taken; injuries examined and diagnosed. Tommy Tucker was indeed suspected of having concussion and Simon Fuller had definitely acquired a broken arm. In the eyes of the law, that constituted bodily harm, possibly grievously, and Mr Judd (who himself sported numerous cuts and bruises to his face) would be accompanying them to the police cells in Bury St Edmunds where he would spend the rest of the night.