Case with 4 Clowns

by Bruce, Leo

  “Good old Uncle,” said another of the hands, and I realized again that this nickname was not the sort that people use when they wish to show a faint contempt for a person. It was more as if Beef had earned the right to be known by a familiar diminutive. I sipped my beer and watched his success, feeling a slight tinge of jealousy as I did so.

  The first to leave the bar were the Darienne brothers. There was nothing secretive in their behavior as they rose from their seat and slipped out of the door, but they gave the impression of a self-sufficiency. I could see them through the crooked glass of the bar window as they walked down the empty main street, walking slowly, moving their heads and shoulders as they talked, and their hands occasionally illustrating or emphasizing a point.

  Since the others looked like staying on for some time yet (Ginger was talking darkly about a return match), I decided to catch up with the Dariennes. They interested me intensely, and I felt I should be doing more to help the “case” by talking to them than Beef was doing by playing darts. I felt that this was probably only another facet of my jealousy of his success, but, nevertheless, I hurried after the two brothers.

  I caught them up at the gate and noticed at the same time that Anita Concini was seated outside her wagon. She waved to us and we walked over to her, passing as we did so Corinne, deep in conversation with the young man of the day before.

  “Who is that?” Paul asked Anita as soon as we had reached her.

  Anita laughed. “A man,” she said.

  “The complete answer,” grinned Christophe. “At least the most important fact as far as Corinne is concerned, eh?”

  “Watch George on top of the lion-tunnel,” said Anita, indicating Kurt, “and see if you can guess what he’s thinking. He ought to be used to that sort of thing by now. Yet he’s been squatting there for the last twenty minutes wishing he had a machine-gun, by the look on his face. I don’t know what he’d do if he had one—probably shoot them both.”

  “That’s absurd,” protested Paul. “One must have the right before it is possible to feel jealous; or at least before one should show one’s jealousy. George has none. We all know that he’s in love with Corinne—it’s something he couldn’t hide anyway if he wanted to—but that doesn’t give him the right to be possessive, does it?”

  Anita seemed to be on the point of speaking, and then she shook her head and laughed quietly. “You know, Paul,” she said, “either you two are very honest and innocent, or else you’re very good actors.”

  “Innocent?” said Paul. “What do you mean by that? The English language is very difficult sometimes.”

  But Anita refused to explain any further, and after a while the two boys walked off, shaking their heads in a puzzled fashion.

  “Why does Corinne behave like that?” I asked Anita as soon as we were alone.

  “Corinne has one main idea,” explained Anita, “and in a way everything she does has something to do with it.”

  “And that is?” I probed.

  “It’s quite simple. She wants to leave the circus.”

  “So she hopes one of these young men will fall in love with her and take her ‘away from it’?” I asked. “A very romantic idea, but scarcely likely, is it?”

  “Oh, no. It’s not that at all,” replied Anita. “I don’t think this is meant for anything really. But I suppose these young fellows who follow her around represent the outside world to her. She doesn’t expect anything from them, or they from her, I don’t suppose. But they fascinate her. I’m surprised she hasn’t had a try at yourself or the Sergeant.”

  “Miaow,” I said.

  “Yes, I know. But you did ask me, didn’t you?”

  When I looked back towards the pair by Jackson’s wagon again, I discovered that the young man was on his way out of the gate, and that Corinne was walking slowly towards Kurt, who was banging fiercely, as if he had not seen her coming.

  “Watch this, Sherlock,” said Anita. “I don’t know what she’s going to say to him, but in about two minutes from now she’ll have George as sweet as pie, and eating out of her hand.”

  And Anita was quite right. I watched Kurt’s face, and from the dour expression which he wore when he greeted Corinne, I watched a gradual change, until in a few minutes he had climbed down off the top of the lion-tunnel and was grinning like a beauty-struck yokel.

  CHAPTER XII

  April 28th (continued).

  BACK in the wagon, and alone, I felt that it was a good opportunity to take stock of the situation. There were so many people involved that I thought I was bound to get muddled unless I put the whole thing straight in my mind as far as it had gone. It had not, it is true, gone very far. There was nothing one could call clues or evidence in the usual way, but nevertheless we had discovered something about the characters of the various people among whom we were living. I took a sheet of paper and began to run through them.

  In the first place, because he was fresh in my memory, was the young clown, Clem Gail. There was the strange contradiction which ruled his life; that he should be unrecognizable in the ring and comparatively unhonored for his skill. This was, at any rate, something new in the private life of a clown. The normal story seems to be that the clown laughs, and hides a breaking heart; that most clowns suffer from chronic dyspepsia, or keep aged mothers. Clem was certainly a departure from the accepted normal. And, moreover, he seemed to see himself as something of a Don Juan, a fact which was again in contradiction to his anonymous self in the ring. But there was little else about him that we had so far discovered. Nothing which seemed to involve him directly in this strange, hypothetical case.

  Next there was Corinne Jackson. She quite obviously wanted to get away from the circus life. In the ring she was almost condescending. And this linked her with the numerous attachments she made with young men outside the show. Yet she was not what one might call the scheming type. The young men who seemed to gather round her at every new village made little impression on her. It appeared to me that she hardly looked on them as means of escaping from the circus life, but rather as expressions of her dislike for all that the circus stood for. Her relationship with her brother seemed to be that of friendly bickering, which characterizes so many brother and sister relations. With her father she was cold and distant, and with her mother offhand and casual. Where did Kurt come in?

  Herr Kurt, or George Franks, to give him his correct name, was quite clearly in love with Corinne. He was jealous of every new friendship she struck up, but since this did not in any way deter her from making them, I assumed that she was not in love with him. And yet we had had an example of Corinne taking pains to dispel that jealousy. It might have been through some special vanity which made her want to be on good terms with all the men in the show, or it might have been that she really did like the lion-trainer and his jealousy flattered her. This was obviously a problem which we should have to solve later.

  There was something, too, in the attitude of Daroga, the wire-walker, to Jackson, which defied definition at this stage. The little incident when we had set up on the wrong tober was illuminating. Jackson was not the sort of boss who is generally laughed at by his staff, and yet Daroga had won in that little tussle. Daroga himself seemed to treat Jackson in a very casual way, which was not completely in keeping with the proprietor’s reputation as an autocrat. What was there between those two? It was something which had not come out into the open so far.

  And then the Dariennes. The younger brother had been teaching Suzanne French, and Paul had been both hurt and surprised at the discovery. The closeness of the two lads, their immense friendship for each other, seemed to argue that this was something out of the ordinary. Where did Suzanne come in in that peculiar relationship? There seemed to be no room for her. And yet there was little doubt that some link did exist between them. Again, only the future could reveal it.

  And why had old Gypsy Margot predicted a murder in the circus? Surely, there was nothing in this fortune-telling business. And yet, unless
she thought such a murder would actually take place, she would hardly have told Albert so. Generally, fortune-tellers take good care not to say anything which can easily be proved wrong. Had she some special reason for thinking a murder would occur? The charge of madness seemed hardly correct. She did not act like a mad woman, and from our experience of her I thought she was most probably very astute under her seer’s guise. Was it important that she was a hypnotist? And the attempted stabbing of Anita by Helen; had that any connection with the murder idea? The original prediction, so Albert had since told us, had been fairly specific. It would take place, the old woman had said, within a month. And that had been quite early in April. It was now the twenty-eighth.

  In relation to all these doubtful points the Concinis seemed fairly simple. There seemed no doubt that Helen had stabbed her sister in a fit of unreasonable self-pity. In actual fact, she loved her sister, but the similarity between the two had produced a sort of jealousy. But an explanation of it did not mean that the whole affair might not happen again in some new form. And the next time the knife might not strike a shoulder-blade. The next time it might possibly be murder. Was that the case we were here to investigate? It was difficult to discover exactly what Beef thought about this. He gave one very little help.

  And as if in answer to my doubts the Sergeant at that moment came into the wagon.

  “So you came back?” I said.

  “Looks like it, doesn’t it?” grinned Beef.

  “Where are all the others?”

  “Oh, most of them are still down the bevvy, but I …”

  “Bevvy?” I asked. “What’s a bevvy?”

  “Boozer,” said Beef shortly. “You know, pub. It’s a circus word.”

  “The good detective,” I said acidly, “always tries to merge with his background. Is that what you’re doing?”

  “There’s no call for you to be sarcastic,” said Beef. “I just picked up a few words here and there. Must be sociable.”

  “And the result of a morning’s work,” I persisted, “is that we now know that ‘bevvy’ is the circus word for pub. Very useful I’m sure.”

  “Don’t you run away with the idea that that’s all I’ve been doing,” protested Beef. “I’ve been watching Kurt with some lion cubs in the ring. That’s why I came across here. I thought you might be interested.”

  “Interested,” I said, “but not very useful.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Beef. “You never know. Anyway, I like watching them. Come on.”

  The huge white tent spread comfortably over the whole field, its canvas top rippling gently in the slight wind. Sun, warm and still, gave the impression of complete inactivity in the circus. At any rate, it was one of the few hours the circus people had free during the day and they generally spent them either in rehearsals, in sleep, in the pub or in each other’s wagons. The field was empty now, except for half a dozen or so school-children, who peered curiously into each tent and wagon, and were never discouraged by the shouts or abuse of the circus folk. It seemed to me that the circus was the peculiar prerogative of children; the one place where their curiosity was a right instead of a nuisance.

  I followed Beef into the big empty tent, where it was cool out of the sun. The strong smell of trodden grass, mixed with that of fresh sawdust, filled the air. The seating stood around in a large circle, empty and bare, and looked much too uneasy and rough to bear the weight of the crowd I knew would fill it at the evening performance. At the moment, however, Beef and I were the only audience, and he directed my attention to the lion cage, where Kurt was trying to persuade the two lion cubs to perform some simple trick.

  Beef seemed to know quite a lot about the business of lion-trainer, and I soon realized that he had certainly not been wasting his time in the few days he had had at the circus.

  “You see how he does it?” he said. “These cubs are only six or seven months old and rather young for training, and he has to be very patient with them. All he’s done so far is to teach them to sit still on their stools, and they won’t always do that. Now watch.”

  The two half-grown cubs were now sitting with a rather bored expression on their faces on the two stools at one side of the cage, while Kurt stood in front of them, talking gently in a soft monotonous voice, repeating the same words over and over again.

  “Goooood boy” he said. “Goooood boy”

  The lions appeared to take no notice whatever of this flattery. Then Kurt took a small piece of meat from his pocket, and sticking it on the top of a short pole, he waved it in front of one of the cubs. The cub pawed at it playfully, trying to grab it, but failed. Then Kurt drew the pole just out of the lion’s reach.

  “Down,” he said, “down.”

  The cub seemed to reflect a moment, and then came slowly off his stool and approached the meat which Kurt brought nearer and nearer to himself and at last dropped on the ground quite close to his feet. The cub approached suspiciously and slowly, and then finally sank flat on the ground and took the meat. Kurt cracked his whip suddenly and the cub ran back to its stool in the corner and sat down.

  “Why,” I said, “they look as tame as tabby cats. I thought this was supposed to be a dangerous game.”

  “I wouldn’t like to go in there anyway,” Beef snorted. “It’s the way he handles them. He knows his job, that chap does.”

  At this point Kurt slipped quickly out of the cage, and lighting a cigarette, walked slowly over towards us.

  “Well,” he said, “do you find it interesting?”

  “Very,” I said.

  “Mr. Townsend here,” interrupted Beef tactlessly, “thinks that those cubs are as tame as cats. What have you got to say to that?”

  Kurt laughed amusedly. “Perhaps they are in some ways,” he conceded. “The job’s not very difficult, once you’ve got the hang of it. But mind you, it’s always dangerous. Now those animals wouldn’t attack me on purpose. But you never know what might happen.”

  “If they wouldn’t attack you, how is it dangerous?” I asked.

  Kurt seemed to be thinking for a moment. At last he said: “Well, look, it’s like this. They’re friendly with you, see? They don’t think of you as a meal. If they were hungry it wouldn’t make them attack you, although I don’t say as they wouldn’t be fidgety and hard to handle. But what makes them dangerous is nerves. All animals are nervous. Now suppose I was in there with them and doing a turn, and some kid threw a firework into the cage. Well, that would frighten the lions. They don’t think, like you and I do. What they’d do is to take a jump out at the nearest thing to them. Might be me and it might be each other. They wouldn’t think ‘It was a kid’s fault.’ They’d just act. And then again, suppose I trod on one of them during the act. It’s no good saying you’re sorry to a lion. If you tread on him he bites you straight away. And a lion bite isn’t something you can pretend you haven’t got. Unless it’s on another lion, of course.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s just one of those funny little things about a lion. You see a lion’s skin isn’t fixed down like ours is, but moves about like a shirt. Then, if you stick a knife into a lion—not that I’d advise you to—the place won’t bleed, because the hole in the skin doesn’t often come in the same place as the hole in his flesh. Course, it festers up after a week or so, but it sometimes makes lions very touchy and you can’t always find out what’s the matter.”

  “Suppose,” interrupted Beef, “that someone had something against you, and wanted to do you in without getting caught.”

  “Who’s got something against me?” demanded Kurt truculently.

  “Nobody, so far as we know,” said Beef. “But just suppose that someone has.”

  “But if nobody has,” objected Kurt. “Why suppose anything so silly?”

  “Well, just for the sake of argument.”

  “I don’t like arguments,” said Kurt.

  Beef looked nonplussed for a moment. “All right,” he said at las
t. “Look at it this way. Suppose there’s a lion-trainer called Smith …”

  “You mean the one with Stirrup’s Circus?” asked Kurt. “Yes, I know him. Got a good mixed act this year.”

  “No,” said Beef patiently, “I don’t mean any particular lion-trainer. This is just a story.”

  “Oh,” said Kurt, understanding dawning at last, “why didn’t you say that in the first place? Do you mean the sort of stories that Mr. Townsend writes?”

  “That’s right,” said Beef, clutching at any straw. “Now Mr. Townsend wants to write a story about a lion-trainer who was murdered, and he doesn’t know how it could be done. Can you tell us how someone might get the lions to do away with him, so that the murderer wouldn’t be caught?”

  “Well,” said Kurt thoughtfully, “he could grease the tops of the stands, so that the lion would slip when he started to jump.”

  “That would be found out too easily,” I said. “Or he could fire a gun just near the cage.”

  “So would that.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Kurt in exasperation. “Strikes me it’s a silly problem anyway. There are lots of ways. All he’s got to do is to scare the lions when the act is on. Nobody need see him. He could hide under the seats, or even do it from outside the tent. He could easily get away before anyone saw him.”

  Beef had been taking all this down in his notebook, and after a brief suspicious glance, Kurt turned back to the cage again. The cubs immediately climbed on to their pedestals as soon as he entered and sat waiting. This time he was apparently going to try the same trick on the second cub which he had been practicing on the first when we came in. The second cub answered quicker than its companion, and was down off the stool almost as soon as Kurt gave the command. But as soon as it had grabbed the meat, the first cub leaped from its stool and attacked it. For a moment the two cubs rolled on the ground snarling at each other, but apparently in nothing more than a mock battle, for Kurt merely took a step back away from them and waited for the fight to finish. But at that moment the two struggling animals rolled towards him and as he moved to step out of their way he tripped and sprawled across them. Immediately, the two animals turned on him, and Beef and I leaped to our feet to run towards the cage. But before we reached it the trainer had got things in hand himself and was out of the cage, slamming the door behind him by the time we got to him.