The Noose

by Philip MacDonald

  Dyson squirmed in his chair until he was almost upright. He opened his eyes. He cocked his head to one side and looked at Anthony. He said:

  ‘Convincing too. Only obvious flaw seems lack of connection. Bronson won’t have Blackatter near the place. That goes on. What’s the hidden trouble about? Any connection earlier?’

  Flood answered that. ‘It’s all,’ he said, ‘coming back to me. There didn’t seem any earlier connection between the two men.’

  ‘But,’ Anthony said, ‘Bronson was a walker, with or without gun. And Mrs Bronson isn’t a walker. Bronson was always out and about by himself. Blackatter was always out and about by himself. Suggestion: they met a great deal more often than the country knew.’

  Dyson closed his eyes again. ‘Anyone see ’em ever?’

  Anthony nodded. ‘One witness thought he had …’ He broked off as Dyson, with another squirm, shot bolt upright. He looked down at Dyson and he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it was not Dollboys.’

  For a moment the heavy-lidded eyes behind the huge spectacles of Mr Dyson opened wide in something like astonishment.

  Flood laughed. ‘Don’t get too clever about here, Mogul. You’re giving away weight, laddie.’ He seemed to enjoy the glare which came at him.

  ‘Not Dollboys,’ Anthony said. ‘The lad Harrigan, who found the dead Blackatter and the unconscious Bronson …’

  ‘And,’ said Flood, grinning at Dyson, ‘you needn’t theorise about Harrigan equalling X. Because Harrigan’s potty. Not there. What the rustics call a Natural.’

  Anthony turned quick eyes on the speaker. ‘He is, eh? Evidence might’ve been just an ordinary clodhopper’s.’

  ‘To read perhaps,’ Flood said. ‘Not to hear, though. And when you see him—’ A shrug finished his sentence.

  The door of the room opened. Lucia came in, and behind her Pike.

  Flood and Dyson got to their feet, the first with a neat though solid alacrity, the second with a writhing, protesting wriggle of his thinness.

  Lucia smiled at her husband, a smile which somehow included his companions. But the smile was short-lived. She was pale. There were faint lines beneath her eyes and faint marks of misery about her mouth. Anthony set a chair for her and in it, without fuss, settled her. He looked then at Pike. He said to Pike:

  ‘Well, you’ve seen wife of D. Bronson. How’s the belief?’ The words were light, but not the tone.

  But Pike did not answer. He shook his head in excuse. In silence he sat. He lit a cigarette but after one inhalation threw it away. Anthony watched him. The long face seemed longer; certainly its tan had now beneath it very little colour. The jaw was set; at either side the knotted muscles showed tense.

  Lucia broke the silence. ‘What have you done?’ She looked up at Anthony.

  He shrugged. ‘Put us all level. And found an oddity.’ He surveyed the four. He took the cigarette from his mouth and flipped it into the grate where it lay smouldering beside Pike’s. He said, with once more that tone which brought all eyes to bear upon him:

  ‘We’re going to start. But before we start, I want one thing clear. You’re going to work on your own, as you find best. But the line of your working’s to be what I say. That clear?’ He did not look at Lucia. His eyes rested first on Pike. Pike nodded. The glance went to Flood.

  ‘’Course!’ said Flood.

  The glance went to Dyson. Once more Dyson was asprawl in his chair. His eyes were closed behind the grotesque glasses. There was a silence.

  ‘Dyson!’ said Anthony.

  The eyes opened, unwillingly it seemed.

  ‘Oh … all right!’ said their owner.

  ‘That,’ said Flood to Anthony, ‘is OK, you know.’

  CHAPTER III

  THE AFTERNOON OF FRIDAY

  I

  THE sun worked round in its course. A pale, bright shaft like the sword-blade of a god stabbed through the high, square, small window in the wall of stone. The man who lay upon the bed stirred and opened his eyes, for the sword-blade had touched them. He muttered to himself, for he had been in something which nearly was sleep and sleep he desired with a great desire. For a while he lay motionless, a great forearm flung up and over his face so that in this little darkness he might strive to catch once more that first soft wave which, loosening a man’s consciousness, tells him delightfully that oblivion is about utterly to dissolve him …

  But presently the arm was lifted from the face. The softness—that blurring of all the edges of all things—was not to be recaptured. He was awake and wide awake. But still he lay, flat upon his back. His eyes moved—little by little, until, just within the edge of their field of sight, there crept what he had known he would see but forever hoped that he would not …

  They were there, as they had been there since the beginning. They sat, square and stolid, in their stiff blue uniforms, upon stiff, awkward little chairs.

  His glance flickered secretly over them. They seemed curiously unreal. He took his eyes from them and lay looking up, along that bright stairway of the sun-ray, full of a myriad dancing things, to the small window. He stared at the window, frowning because the brightness hurt his eyes. He went on staring at the window, for he knew that if he stared long enough there would form, in that small sky-backed square, a faint, quickly-fading picture.

  He stared until his eyes ached and a savage little pain behind them carved deeper the lines of the little frown between them. And then, mistily, he saw her …

  II

  Bronson’s wife looked out from a window upon a world bathed in a flood of hard bright sunshine which poured over the land like golden wine. But she saw neither land nor light. She saw a square stone box and inside that box a man …

  She stood upright. Her arms hung down at her sides. She was motionless. She seemed scarcely to breathe. And her face was like a dead face—save for the eyes. And these eyes burned with a steady blue fire.

  The window before which she stood was open and through it came that fierce wind whose breath was ice. Her own breath hung upon the air in little white clouds.

  She stood there, and her eyes sent out their gaze. But they saw nothing that was there for them to see. They saw only that square box of stone which stood in her mind.

  Sounds from outside, beneath the window, brought her back to herself … She shivered. She found herself to be aching with cold. She peered out of the window. She saw, coming out from the door beneath, the tall figure of the man who had believed her. A sudden energy seized upon her. This man and the other men that were with him—they were working for her … The image of the box of stone grew less in her mind and lesser. She shut the window and moved away from it and once more moved about the house.

  III

  Anthony was on his way to the village. Anthony swung along with his lazy-seeming stride at a pace which many men would have found impossible. His feet beat out a clanging rhythm on the frostbound road. His pipe, wedged in a corner of his mouth, sent up blue spirals to blend with the white clouds of his breath.

  He came to the corner by the church and swung round it, over the little white bridge across the river and so into the one street of the village of Farrow. He slackened his pace. His hands dug themselves deeper into his pockets. His eyes glanced this way and that as he walked. Halfway down the narrow, cobbled street, they saw what they had been seeking. A small, low-windowed, frowning little shop, over its door the word J. HARRIGAN—TOBACCONIST & NEWSAGENT, in its window an untidy raffle of newspapers, pattern-books, pipes, jars of bullseyes and other more violently-coloured sweetmeats, sheets of ‘transfers’, tins of tobacco and threepenny stories of Buffalo Hill.

  He went up the three worn steps and, bending to save his head, into the shop of J. Harrigan. A dim and dusty place, as vague and characterless, despite its age, as the man—presumably J. Harrigan himself—who, slowly and with a fussy deliberation, served him with two tins of tobacco, a torn Morning Mercury and a packet of matches.

  Anthony tendered a one-pound
note. At this the dim and dusty man stared a moment. He mumbled over it and at last shuffled off, through a droopingly-curtained doorway. From behind the curtain came more mutterings; more shuffling; the rattle of a cash-box.

  Anthony sat himself down upon the edge of the deal counter which held the sorry-looking booklets and papers. He opened his Mercury and became apparently engrossed.

  The curtain swayed, sending out a little cloud of dust. J. Harrigan returned. He counted out, with much frowning analysis, the change from the note. Anthony pocketed this, and folded up his paper with weariness. He said:

  ‘Nothing of any interest there. Seems very little doing just now.’

  Mr Harrigan mumbled. He was lean and bent and wrinkled and very tired.

  Anthony, surveying him, decided that finesse was unnecessary. Anthony said:

  ‘No fires; no frauds; no murder cases. The last interesting murder was that one about here …’ His eyes took veiled stock of Mr Harrigan. Was this too crude?

  It was not. Mr Harrigan, with the words, became a different man. A light came into his face. He seemed straighter and younger and almost alive. When he spoke, it was no longer to mumble but to issue words with a high-pitched and squeaking clarity.

  ‘Ah!’ said Mr Harrigan. ‘You’re right there, sir.’ His accent showed him an exiled Londoner. ‘You are right!’ He seemed about to say more, but shut his mouth firmly. His little eyes, now bright with interest, seemed to implore that the subject should not be killed.

  Anthony began to fill his pipe. He took his gaze from Mr Harrigan’s face. He said idly:

  ‘Yes. That was an interesting business for a student of these things. Straightforward enough, of course. I mean there was no doubt as to Bronson’s being guilty. But there were interesting points. At one time I thought of going into it and working it up for my next book. But I was away from England and missed the trial. And everyone’s forgetting all about it now—even about here, I should think. I couldn’t get any first-hand stuff worth having, so I dropped the idea. Pity, in a way. It would’ve been a contrast to most of the other cases where there’s doubt as to guilt.’ He finished his pipe-loading, and began to strip the cover from his packet of matches. He appeared bored, and felt shame. The crudity of all this was offensive; but where crudity will serve crudity means speed.

  Mr Harrigan snapped joyously at the fly. He said, in that high and rattling voice:

  ‘D’you write books, sir? Detective tales, sir?’

  Anthony, busied now with getting his pipe alight, shook his head. ‘Not detective stories,’ he muttered round the pipe-stem. ‘Not fiction at all.’ The scorn for fiction which his tone implied was great. ‘No, I write upon the psychological, philosophical and physiological aspects of criminology.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Mr Harrigan. He added, hesitantly, that he saw. And then there fell a silence. Anthony made little movements indicative of departure. The eyes of Mr Harrigan shone with something like agony. Very little, except a continual and increasing failure to make both ends meet, had happened in Mr Harrigan’s existence of sixty years except the killing of Blackatter and his vivacious connection with that killing. For weeks he had lived in the centre of a drama; for weeks he had been listened to and consulted and honoured, and then, little by little, this prominence had seeped away until now his life had become again that grey, shiftless struggle—only now it was greyer, more hopeless, by reason of his knowledge of higher states. And here, miraculously, hope had come again, in most superior guise, into his life. He could not bear to see it so swiftly depart. Beneath the counter his old hands clenched until his nails dug into the palms. He said, in a little rush of words:

  ‘P’r’aps I could ’elp over the case, sir, I’ve not fergotten nothink of it. Nothink. It’s all as clear in me ’ead as if it’d ’appened only last evening. It is that! And I was connected, you might say, most intimate with the ’ole affair. I …’

  Anthony exhibited a sudden and intense surprise. He became most excitedly animate. ‘Harrigan!’ he said. ‘Harrigan? Harrigan? That’s the name over this shop. Harrigan!… I say, are you the man who discovered the body?’

  Mr Harrigan smiled his smile of triumph. He strove to repress it, but out it came, irradiating him. He nodded impressively. He let that nod sink in before he spoke. And then he said:

  ‘Well … it wasn’t me exactly, sir. It was my boy Tom. But it comes, you might say, to the same thing. Or more so, like. Because Tom—it’s our cross, sir, Mrs ’Arrigan’s and mine—our boy’s … well, Simple’s what we call it. An’ so you see, sir, I reely knows, you might say, more about things than what he does.’

  ‘I see,’ said Anthony. He was standing now, and the air of weary boredom which Mr Harrigan had noticed about this gentleman at first was still most noticeably absent. The gentleman was, in fact, Mr Harrigan saw, all excitable-like. And the gentleman proceeded to make a proposal to Mr Harrigan which filled with joy Mr Harrigan’s heart. For not only did it mean that Mr Harrigan was—for this gentleman at least—a centre of interest, but it also put five pounds into Mr Harrigan’s very empty pocket. The only fly which Mr Harrigan could find in all this pleasing ointment was the gentleman’s reply to Mr Harrigan’s last question. He had said:

  ‘I don’t think so, Mr Harrigan. No. Very kind suggestion on your part, but not one I’d care to accept. We criminologists’—here the gentleman had coughed—‘we criminologists you know, are accustomed to dealing with all sorts and conditions. Of course, after I’ve been up there with the boy, I may want to ask questions of you. And again, of course, I shan’t hesitate to do so … Now, if you wouldn’t mind fetching the boy … Thank you.’

  And so the boy was fetched. Through the lopsided, dust-ridden curtain Mr Harrigan led him, and Anthony saw that the word ‘boy’ was applicable only in description of a mental age. For this Thomas Harrigan was perhaps thirty years old. He seemed as he came in, towering over his little wisp of a father, a giant. He was actually a man over the middle-size and holding himself so that the most was made of his height and thickness. He walked solidly, and yet with something of that shambling uncertainty which marks the mentally-underdeveloped. But his face—a brown, open, mild and weather-beaten face, was unlined as that of a twelve-year-old. His blue eyes were wide and round and astonished. To Anthony the old man said:

  ‘I’ve told him, sir, what ’e’s got to do. He understands all right. Don’t you, boy?’

  Tom nodded. He kept an unwinking gaze upon the stranger, who smiled at him with a friendly and uncondescending openness. Tom smiled back, showing teeth of a dazzling white.

  Anthony looked at the father. ‘Far to go?’ he said.

  Old Harrigan shook his head. ‘Little under a mile, sir. He’ll take you there the shortest route, Tom will. Won’t you, boy?’

  Again Tom nodded. ‘Tom knows all quick ways,’ he said. His voice was high-pitched, like his father’s, and it carried, too, the queer uncertainty of a child’s.