On the last word he strode out of the room and nobody attempted to stop him. Tonker’s confession had been made.
The silence was broken by Superintendent Fred South.
“He held the share the wrong way,” he said, “and he wasn’t acting. I don’t see that we’ve got anything on him, Chief. Nothing that will stick, at all.” He paused and went on dreamily, almost, his dangerous twinkle returning. “He’s got a temper though, hasn’t he? Just right. Sudden, and clean off the handle for a couple of minutes. It wouldn’t take any more.”
Luke turned helplessly to Campion.
“That woman Dinah,” he remarked. “She’s the next to go through the hoop. I wonder if she left Mrs. Cassands for long that afternoon?”
Chapter 13
THREE IN A ROW
WITH A HIGH top wind sending the clouds as ragged as the countries on a map, coasting across the moon, the bright studio light streaming across the meadows and the soft house ones glowing in the dusk, Midsummer’s Eve flickered over The Beckoning Lady with traditional excitement. There was a streak of red in the west, so the weather was safe. Preparations had nearly reached the blessed stage of ‘leave it alone or you’ll spoil it’. The big back larder, which was a white elephant on any other day of the year, was full to overflowing. The cream was on the ice and the hams were setting nicely.
There was considerable noise in the front of the house, where Tonker had set up a Press Bar in the drawing-room, and the river was rising well. But the barn was busiest of all.
Mr. Campion was helping Emma, or rather he was standing about ready to help her as she did something mysterious with hundreds of knives, forks and spoons at a temporary sideboard some twelve feet long just inside the big doors, which were open to the sky. She was as fresh as if her youth had returned, as no doubt it had, and her cheeks were glowing like a Dutch doll’s.
“I don’t mind telling you,” she was saying, “for half an hour I thought the party was off. I like Tonker. I’m not one of the people who can’t see that it’s not old buck with him. It’s just singleness of purpose. But there are moments when he’s the edge, and if that dates me I couldn’t care less. Fancy coming home like the wrath of God and starting a fight now of all times in the year. And what about, I ask, and what about? Whether a man who’s been dead a week was paid or not. Really, Tonker wants his head decarbonising. And Minnie’s as bad. One day she’ll have a stroke, and she’ll see if she’s as strong as she thinks she is. Red Indian blood! Red Indian motor-bicycle blood.”
“But everything is all right now, I trust?” Mr. Campion looked as foolish as he had ever done.
She threw up her head like a horse shaking its mane. “Till next time,” she said. “Let’s hope they wait until the people have gone home, that’s all. Oh!” It was a cry from the heart. “Do you realise that in forty-eight hours it will be over? Over! How dreadful! I can’t bear to think of it. Count these forks. There should be fifty.”
Mr. Campion counted twenty-five and decided to judge by weighing the two bundles.
“Emma,” he said, “last Thursday week, before you settled down to listen to the radio and saw Little Doom in the drive, did you come up to the house for any reason? Tonker thought he heard someone.”
“And didn’t investigate, I suppose?” she demanded. “How like him. If Tonker’s working, a coach and four could drive up to the front door and remove every stick of furniture, and he wouldn’t bother to come out to enquire. No, I didn’t come up. But if he heard someone, someone was there. Now the spoons. Don’t thumb them, they’re polished.”
“Who would walk into the house unannounced?”
“Any one of about forty people. This is the country. Everyone walks round until they find somebody.”
“Do you want these knives counted?”
“No. Now I’ve got to rush off to see to the flowers. Pinkie let us down. Apparently Genappe has returned, so we shan’t get any help from her. Anyway, I’ve picked the flowers and I’ve got Annabelle at work on them in the washhouse. I’ll just go and see what she’s made of them. The boys can finish the cups.”
She jerked her head to the far end of the barn where Westy and George Meredith were unpacking piles of blue and white china, dusting the teacups and setting them out in rows.
“Tea is hell.” Emma spoke with feeling. “It’s more difficult to serve than anything else. I can’t think why people want it at a party. Do go and look at Jake’s picture. Minnie came and got it from him and there was a row, but he likes it now.”
She swept off, her white head-dress flapping, while Mr. Campion went on down the room obediently and found himself looking at a charming, gentle design in various tones of grey. The snail was still the main motif but was now not three-dimensional. The picture was lazily attractive, restful and comforting. He felt he could live with it.
He was standing looking at it when he became aware of a young voice on the other side of the table behind him. Westy was talking to his sombre friend, who was doing little with the cups but much in grim moral support.
“I certainly realise that I am in no position to judge.” The soft New England voice was very earnest. “And it may well be, George, that you are at an advantage, being virtually a stranger here. But it does occur to me that they make life unnecessarily complicated. I may be wrong, and of course Minnie is peculiarly close to me because we share the same blood, but as I see it she doesn’t need anything but her Art and never has.”
George Meredith contributed a strange inarticulate sound.
“That is very true,” said Westy miraculously, “but I admit it does seem to me to be so elementary. Why clutter yourself with Tonker, who is a good fellow enough in his way—that I will not deny—but he can only be an interruption. In fact, a definitely disruptive influence in a life which should be entirely and solely devoted to the production of very beautiful things. From this angle, you know, my dear chap, I cannot help but think that life is extraordinarily simple if it is approached with deliberation. Why fall in love at all? Is it so necessary in a civilised person?”
There was a minor upheaval behind the table and Mr. Campion, who felt a fool as well as a cad for listening to something which made him feel so antiquated, nerved himself for an experience. The child was about to speak.
“I say, hold on old fellow,” said George Meredith in a very high-pitched British middle-class voice indeed. “Think of the Race.”
So they were all right, and so was humanity, and Mr. Campion turned down the room again to where, under the platform made by the floor of the inner studio, Amanda and Lugg and Rupert were finishing the resuscitation of the glübalübali.
“How nice you look,” said Amanda for no apparent reason. “Cool and respectable and mildly entertained. Aren’t we having a glorious, glorious time?”
“Speak for yer perishin’ self.” Mr. Lugg disentangled himself from the embrace of one of the monstrosities and gave it a cursory rub with a duster he was carrying. “I don’t like these ’ere. I don’t think they’re the article. They’re common, like elephants’ insides.”
“More common to you than to me,” said Mr. Campion impolitely. “How has it gone?”
“Jolly well.” Amanda as usual was very interested in the practical problem. “We’ve got two to play, one to grunt, and two for show. Tonker must have an amazing mind. The principle of the mechanics of this instrument—”
“Is low.” Mr. Lugg spoke savagely. “Principally low. And you can talk as informed as you like, but it won’t alter it. Mr. Tonker may be a remarkable organisator, but ’is mind belongs to the Spirit Dead-Egg.”
“My hat yes.” Amanda rose dexterously from the floor where she had been sitting cross-legged. “Do you know, Albert, Tonker came into the house, got all the champagne moved to four separate highly sensible strategic points, had the wherry brought down the stream and fixed in position as a bridge—we’re not to wait for the Augusts to make a triumphal entry, because no one knows how, when, or if they’
ll arrive—set up a Press Bar of hard liquor which he’d bought at the pub—he came down from the village in The Gauntlett’s van—got hold of Minnie and had the fiercest row I have ever heard in all my life with her, and got himself changed, all in one hour and three-quarters flat. Oh, and he also had an omelette. He really is remarkable.”
“Reorientations. He got my reorientations right, too,” said Rupert, attempting a running tackle at his father. “Uncle Tonker is a conker, silly bonker, I am like Uncle Tonker.”
“God forbid,” said Mr. Campion. “Bed for you.”
“Not yet.” It was Amanda. “Not yet. We’re all going to sleep late tomorrow, and then we’re going to dress up and come to the party looking very clean and elegant in our best clothes, and be suitably impressed by all our clever handiwork which we shall not brag about except in private, or . . .”
“Casual-ly,” said Rupert, who had evidently heard the plan before. “Where is Charlie?”
“Luke? He’s talking to Miss Diane. They’re upstairs on the landing. It seemed the quietest place. Superintendent South had to rush back to his office to see the Chief Constable.”
“Good.” Amanda was studiously polite. “I fear he may have his hands full. I’ve not been exactly eavesdropping or anything indelicate like that, but I did happen to overhear one of the reporters say that the local office of the Inland Revenue is simply livid with the way Little Doom has been described as an Income Tax man. They say he was declared redundant months ago, and that he was incompetent anyway, and they only took him on as a ‘temporary’ in the war, and that he wasn’t their class and they never did like him. It’s jolly hard on them because apparently they’re rather good. If they stick to their guns, the whole thing may fizzle quietly away as a story, the reporter said.”
“Except that the silly fellow happens to be dead,” murmured Mr. Campion. “That’s inescapable.”
Amanda raised her eyebrows enquiringly and he shook his head.
“This wretched marriage business is a nuisance,” he said softly.
“After I have married you,” said Rupert to his mother, to make certain that she should not feel overlooked, “I shall marry the fattest twin.”
“Which one is that?” Mr. Campion was interested. “I thought them both well covered.”
“The fattest then, of course.” Rupert seemed to find him stupid. “And I shall shout at her and put her across a bed and smack her until she cries, and then I shall kiss her until she laughs, and we shall go downstairs and pour out drinks for a lot of visitors.” He took a short run round the group, looking under his lids at them, to see if his somewhat oblique method of reporting gossip had gone home. Satisfied by their startled exchange of glances that it had, he returned to Lugg, having nothing more of interest to impart to them at the moment.
“You quit pertending to be young.” The fat man’s murmur was a growl. “You think you’re so clever, you’ll run parst yerself. Shut up, and let persons ’ave a bit o’ private life in their own ’ouses. I’m ashamed of you be’aving as if you was an ole woman come to tea.”
Rupert flushed but his eyes were dangerous.
“Dinah’s got a bicycle bell,” he said.
“What if she ’as?” Lugg was truculent. “What if she ’as?”
“Well, she wanted one,” said Rupert. “She said so. She’s wanted one for a very long time.”
“And so Old ’Arry come along and give ’er a brandnoo second’and one for ’er birthday, which it ain’t. Orl right, orl right, we’ve ’eard it. Now come orf it and shut up.”
“But she was de-lighted,” Rupert insisted wickedly. “De-lighted. She kept saying so until he told her to holdergab.”
“Now then, now then,” Lugg’s voice rose in warning cadence, “that’s enough. That will do. Bed you. I’ll see to it meself.”
He swung the child under one mighty arm and turned to the parents.
“I’m seein’ to this,” he said firmly. “A lot of mamby-pamby just another hower will make a little spiv of ’im. You shut up, my lad. I don’t orfen put my foot down, but when I do . . .”
“You ring a bicycle bell,” muttered Rupert, half suffocated, and he hung scarlet-faced but silent as he was carried off.
“It’s a good thing,” said Amanda, regretful but philosophic. “Lugg is tired too. I fear he’s had words with his lady friend. Old Harry won her back with gifts. Old Harry is quite rich, they say,” she added as an afterthought. “He keeps his gold in a tin biscuit box, bound up with barbed wire.”
“Barbed wire?” Mr. Campion echoed in astonishment.
“So they say.” Amanda seemed to find the fact interesting but not extraordinary. “He’s very much of a country person. I don’t know quite where the gold comes from, but he picks things up and sells them, and I should think he makes quite a bit on the side. Odds and ends, you know. He’s just given Dinah a bicycle bell which he must have got from somewhere. They were oiling it because it was very wet, but it was quite a good one.”
They wandered into the house together and joined Minnie and Tonker, who were sitting placidly in the drawing-room amid a welter of dirty glasses, talking amicably about the probable reaction of Lady Glebe and The Revver to Prune’s affair with Luke.
“The woman may say anything,” declared Tonker. “She’s insane. She was a Gallantry. The Revver won’t notice it happened for about ten years, and then he’ll hope it wasn’t true. That dreary man . . .”
“Put up with you jolly well,” finished Minnie. “He wasn’t angry for long and even laughed a little in the end.”
Tonker’s expression of concentrated villainy was lightened by a gleam as he poured his old friends a nightcap.
“Did you hear about my appearance in the parish magazine?” he enquired.
“I heard in the village that you’d been ‘advertising of yourself’,” said Amanda. “You had a row with The Revver actually in church, didn’t you?”
“Wasn’t it frightful!” Minnie was appalled. “There was no service at the time, of course.”
“There was no real row,” protested Tonker, passing the glasses. “It was simply this. Judge for yourselves. I don’t get along to the old boy’s dreary services, as you know, because I’m not always here. But I walked up to the church one day, because I wanted to look at some wizzo lettering on the Pontisbright Tomb. I was mucking about very peacefully, admiring things, when I suddenly thought I wasn’t being very respectful. I thought ‘God Tonker, you are a stinker, only coming up here when you want something’, so I got down very decently and said something—not aloud, of course, but something simple—like ‘O God, make me a good Tonker and let Mr. Guggenheim pass that scheme’. Something perfectly normal and ordinary.” He cocked a wicked eye at them. “And then I noticed the old Revver. He’d been watching me from behind the vestry curtains, the old so-and-so, and presently he came creeping down to me and paused just in front of me where I was kneeling and said, if you please, ‘Are you all right?’ I didn’t get up but I stared at him and I said—in a whisper, you understand, the whole conversation was conducted in whispers—‘What do you mean? Of course I’m all right.’ And he said very nastily ‘Oh I thought you couldn’t be. You never come to worship.’ And I said, ‘Well, what on earth do you think I’m doing now, you fathead?’ And he said ‘Don’t be blasphemous, Tonker’. He did, he really did! Well, after I left him, which was pretty smartly, he went round the village telling people I’d gone off my head and got religious mania. I heard it at The Gauntlett half a dozen times, and I resolved to teach the man a lesson.”
Minnie was trying not to laugh but the tears were creeping out of her eyes and rolling down her long nose.
“It was very naughty,” she protested.
“It was not. It was very dignified. I knew he’d never apologise, the rat. You know what a parish magazine is like, Campion?” Tonker turned to his friend. “It’s a solid wodge of family matter which is the same for every parish—syndicated stuff—but the outside double
page just under the cover is printed separately for every community. It opens with a letter from the local parson to his flock, and the whole of the rest of the space is taken up with two-inch ads inserted and paid for by local tradespeople. You know: ‘My bread is good bread. B. Bunn, Baker’. ‘Have a good coffin while you’re about it. H. Hearse, Undertaker’, and so on. Well, I went to my old friend the wheelwright, who has the centre of the back inner page, and came to a deal with him, and the next month in his space there was my announcement. ‘Apology accepted. T. Cassands.’ That caught The Revver in a cleft stick. He didn’t notice a thing until he’d delivered the whole lot by hand on his bicycle, which he does as an act of humility. I knew he wouldn’t.”
“And then he laughed,” said Minnie, “so it’s all right. He’s forgiven you.”
“He hasn’t, you know,” said Tonker. “He doesn’t like me, and he thinks I’m veering to Rome, secretly. I can see it in his eye. Anyway, I expect he has a bucketful with the old lady. She believes in all the religions, Polytheism, Sufism, Fire Worship, the Water Cure, Buddhism, and Rosicrucianism—the lot. Come to think of it, that girl must have quite a time between the two of ’em. No wonder she looks a bit blah.”
“I think she’s in love now,” ventured Amanda.
“Love!” Tonker spoke with withering contempt and he glared balefully out of the window behind her at the moonlit garden. “Pah! What’s love? How much can it stand?”
“That,” said Minnie with some asperity, “is a thing I sometimes wonder.”
Meanwhile, on the landing upstairs Luke was finishing his interrogation of a frightened but very shrewd-eyed Miss Diane. The Sergeant, whom he had borrowed from South to fulfil regulation requirements, was a dark shadow in the background. But at the end of the hall there was a grandfather clock and on this the Chief Inspector kept his eye. The last train from London was due in at Kepesake station in something under half an hour.
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