Brand X

by Christianna Brand

  And at the foot of the cornerstone the Grand Mysterioso tumbled with his lame leg doubled up under him, clasping in his arms the dying man who for so many years had been his dresser, chauffeur, servant, and friend—who for the last five years, since the accident that had crippled him, had almost literally never left his side—tumbled there, holding the dying man to his breast, roaring defiance at the building opposite, from which the shot had come. ‘You fools, you murderers, you’ve got the wrong man!’ And he had bent his head to listen. ‘Dear God, he’s saying—he’s saying—come close, listen to him! He’s saying, “Thank God they only got me! It was meant for you.’”

  Thirteen years ago—a cornerstone to be laid for the local hospital, just another chore in the public life of Mr. Mysterioso, stage magician extraordinary. But mounting to the tiny platform, leaning his crippled weight on the servant’s arm, there had come the sharp crack of the rifle shot. And in the top-floor room of the unfinished hospital wing, looking down on the scene, they had found the fixed rifle with one spent bullet. And nobody there. Up on the roof a press photographer who couldn’t have got down to the window where the gun was fixed; down at the main entrance a policeman on duty, seen by a dozen pairs of eyes tearing up the stairs towards the murder room, moments after the shot. In all that large, open, easily searched building—not another soul.

  Twelve—thirteen?—years ago; and now they were gathered together, eight of them—to talk it over, to try to excise the scar that had formed in the mind of a boy—of the boy whose father had been dismissed from the force ‘for negligence on duty’, had ever afterwards suffered from the results of the act that day, and who now was dead.

  For the boy had developed an obsession of resentment against the only other person involved, the man on the roof, who nowadays called himself ‘Mr. Photoze’—whose first step on the road to fame had come with the picture he had taken that day of the lion head raised, the brilliant eyes glaring, the outraged defiance. ‘My father didn’t fire that shot—therefore you must have,’ was the burden of the young man’s message, and there had been a succession of threats and at last a physical attack.

  They had sent him to see a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist had muttered darkly about paranoia and complexes and ‘a disturbed oedipal pattern—the boy is subconsciously jealous of the father’s domination of the mother, which seems to have been considerable. He feels guilty towards the father, and now seeks to cover up the recollection of his inner hatred by an exaggerated feeling of protection towards the father, now that the father is dead and unable, as it were, to protect himself.’ A long period of treatment, said the psychiatrist, would be necessary.

  Half an hour of treatment, said Mr. Photoze to his friend Mysterioso, would be more like it. Once convince the boy…‘Hold a little court, get together some of the people who were present and talk it out.’

  ‘The very thing!’ Mysterioso had agreed, delighted. It would be entertaining; he was an old man now, long retired from the stage. It would give him something to do, sitting here crippled and helpless in his chair all day.

  So here they were, gathered together in Mr. Mysterioso’s large lush apartment: Mysterioso himself and Inspector Block, who as a young constable had been on the scene of the crime; and a lady and gentleman who had been on the hospital balcony and seen the young policeman running up the stairs after the shot had been fired; and a lady who had been close to the site and seen and heard it all. And a once-lovely lady, Miss Marguerite Devine, the actress, who might also have something to say; and Mr. Photoze. Mr. Photoze was madly decorative in dress, and a half-dozen fine gold bracelets jingled every time he moved his arm.

  The boy sat hunched against an arm of the sofa, strained against it as though something dangerous to him crouched at the other end. He hated them. He didn’t want their silly help; he wanted to be avenged on Mr. Photoze, who had committed a crime and got off scot-free, as a result of which his father had lost his job and his happiness and his faith in men. And his mind wandered back over the frightening, uneasy childhood, the endless bickering and recrimination over his too perceptive young head; the indigence, the sense of failure…‘I don’t want to hear all this, I know what I know. Because of what he did, my father’s life was ruined. I meant all those threats. I failed last time, but next time I’ll get him.’

  ‘You do see!’ said Mr. Photoze, appealing to the rest of them with outflung arms and a tinkling of gold.

  ‘Your father was never accused of anything,’ said Inspector Block. ‘He was dismissed—’

  ‘“Dismissed for negligence”—everyone knew what that meant. He lived under suspicion till the day he died. He died with no job and no money; my mother has no money to this day.’

  ‘We are going to lift that suspicion,’ said Mysterioso. ‘That’s what we’re here for; we’re going to clear the whole thing up. You shall represent your father, Mr. Photoze will be in the dock with you, defending himself. And here we have our witnesses—who also will be our jury. And I shall be the judge. If in the end we all come to the conclusion that your father was innocent, and Mr. Photoze was innocent also, won’t you feel better?’ He said very kindly, ‘We only want to help you.’

  The boy watched him warily. He’s not doing this for my sake, he thought. He’s doing it because he wants to be on a stage again, and this is the nearest he can get to it. He’s just a vain, conceited old man; he wants to show off.

  A vain man, yes: a man consumed with vanity—enormously handsome once, with the tawny great mane, now almost white, a man of world wide fame, a great performer—and not only on stage if his boastings were at all to be trusted—despite the fact that the car accident at the height of his career had left him unable to walk more than a few steps unaided. It was whispered behind mocking hands that on romantic occasions his servant Tom had to lead him to the very bedside and lower him down to it. Certainly he was never seen in public without Tom: a walking stick was not enough, and as for a crutch, ‘Do you see me hopping about playing Long John Silver?’ Close to Tom, gripping Tom’s strong left arm, the lameness was hardly noticeable. On stage he had continued to manage brilliantly with the aid of cleverly positioned props which he could hold on to or lean against. It was a total lack of strength only; he suffered no pain…

  He gave three knocks on the table by his side—the three knocks that usher in the judge in Central Criminal Court Number One at the Old Bailey. ‘We’ll take first the evidence of the police.’

  Inspector Block, paying lip service to all this foolishness, was interested nevertheless to see the outcome. ‘May it please your lordship, members of the jury. Twelve years and six months ago, almost to this very day, the police were shown an anonymous letter which had been received by the famous stage magician, Mr. Mysterioso. It was the first of a dozen or so, over the next six months. They were composed of words cut out from the national dailies, and enclosed in cheap envelopes, varying in size and shape, posted from widely differing parts of the country. I may add here that no one concerned with the case appeared to have had the opportunity to post them, unless of course it was done for the sender by different persons. At any rate, the letters were untraceable. They were all abusive and threatening and evidently from the same person; they were all signed ‘Her Husband’.

  ‘Mr. Mysterioso made no secret of having received them, and there was a good deal of excitement as each new one arrived. The police gave him what protection they could, and when in June he came down to Thrushford in Kent to lay a cornerstone, it was our turn—I was a young constable then and didn’t know very much about it, but it was rather anxious work for my superiors, because he had done a brief season at the theatre there a couple of years before.

  ‘It was arranged, therefore, to cover certain points round the site of the ceremony. The cornerstone was for a new wing. A second wing, completed on the outside but not on the inside, lay between the cornerstone and the main hospital building.’ He drew a plan in the air, a circular movement with the flat palm of t
he right hand for the main building of the hospital, a stab with the forefinger of the left hand for the cornerstone, and a sharp slash with the edge of the hand for the unfinished wing lying midway between them. ‘It was from a middle window on the top floor of this wing that the shot was fired.’

  And he described the unfinished wing. A simple oblong; ground floor and two storeys, with its main entrance at one end. This entrance had no door as yet, was only a gap leading into a little hall out of which the stairs curled round the still-empty lift shaft. All other entrances boarded up. A sloping roof of slate surrounded by a ledge with a low parapet.

  ‘It was an easy matter to search it. Except on the top floor there were no interior walls, and up there only half a row of rooms was completed—each floor was designed to have a central corridor with small rooms leading off both sides. There was a lot of stuff about, planks and tools and shavings and so on, but literally nowhere big enough for a man to hide. It was searched very thoroughly the night before the ceremony and less thoroughly the next morning, and a constable was placed at the main entrance with orders not to move away from it.’

  ‘And he didn’t move away from it,’ said the boy. ‘That was my father.’

  Inspector Block ignored him. ‘The order of events is as follows: one hour before the ceremony, Mr. Mysterioso arrived, and the Superintendent explained the arrangements to him. Their way to the main hospital building, where the reception committee awaited him, led past the entrance of the unfinished wing. Just outside it a man was speaking to the policeman on duty.’

  ‘The murderer was speaking to the policeman on duty,’ said the boy.

  ‘This person was well known to the police,’ said the Inspector, ignoring the young man again, ‘as a press photographer—not yet calling himself Mr. Photoze. He wanted permission to go up on the roof and take pictures of the ceremony from there.’

  ‘Always one for the interesting angle,’ said Mr. Photoze archly.

  ‘The Super was about to refuse him, but Mr. Mysterioso recognised the man and said he should be permitted to go up. So he was carefully searched for any weapons, and it ended in all of them going up to the top floor together. Mr. Mysterioso, of course, had his man, Tom, to help him.’

  ‘We’d been together so long,’ said Mysterioso, ‘that really in the end we moved like a single person, always running a sort of three-legged race. I had no pain from this thing, it was only a total lack of strength. A couple of flights of stairs was nothing to us.’

  You couldn’t get on with it, with these people, thought the Inspector. They all wanted to exhibit. ‘At any rate, they went up,’ he proceeded, letting a little of his irritability show. ‘There was a trap door, the only exit to the roof, and Mr. Photoze, as we now call him, was helped up through it with his gear. At that moment Tom came down the corridor, having left his master standing propped up against the window-sill in one of the little rooms, looking down with interest at the site. Tom said he didn’t like it, that he felt uneasy about the whole thing; the man shouldn’t have been allowed up. Someone—I think in fact it was P.C. Robbins, the man on the door, this young man’s father—suggested that there was a bolt which could be shot from the inside, locking the photographer out on the roof. So this was done. Mysterioso was waiting for them at the door of the little room, and they went on to the cornerstone.

  ‘And then—it happened. The guest of honour went up the four shallow steps that led to the platform in front of the cornerstone. There was a shot, and both men fell. A minute later Tom, the servant, died in his master’s arms. As he died he was heard to say: “Thank God they only got me! It was meant for you.”’

  ‘He said it over and over,’ said the woman who had been near the site. ‘Over and over. It was so dreadful, so touching—’

  ‘Let us hear from our witnesses later,’ said Mysterioso; but he looked down at his hands, lying in his lap, and when she continued, made no further attempt to stop her.

  For the woman was carried away, full of tragic memories, and could not be still. ‘I can see them now! A moment before, it had all been so lovely, so sunny and pleasant, all the doctors from the hospital there and lots of guests, and Matron, of course, and some of the nurses, and Mr. Mysterioso looking so magnificent, if I may say so’—she made a little ducking movement which the great man graciously accepted—‘with his top hat and flowing black cloak, as though he’d just walked down from the stage to come and lay our cornerstone for us.

  ‘And then—they went up the steps together, he on the left. His man walked very close to him, and I suppose that under the cloak his arm was holding tight to his man’s arm; but you wouldn’t have guessed that he was lame at all. They stood there in the sunshine and a few words were spoken and so on; and then the man put out his hand to take the trowel, which was on a stand to his right, and pass it across to his master—and suddenly there was this sharp crack!—and before we knew what was happening, the man fell and dragged his master down with him.’ And the lifting up of the splendid head with its tawny, grey-streaked hair, the great roar of defiance flung up at the window from which the shot had come…

  ‘When you think,’ said the woman, ‘what a target he presented! We had all swung round to where the shot came from, and we could see a man up on the roof. Of course, we all thought he was the murderer. And at any moment he might have taken a second shot and really killed the right man this time.’

  ‘If he was in fact the right man,’ said Inspector Block, throwing a cold pebble into this warm sea of emotion. ‘Not all of us were convinced at the time that the shot wasn’t meant for Tom.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ said Mysterioso. ‘Who would want to kill Tom?—my poor, inoffensive, faithful, loving old Tom. And what about the threatening letters? Besides, he said it himself—over and over, as the lady says. He’d have known if he’d had such an enemy, but he said it himself, “It was meant for you.”’ He appealed to the woman. ‘You heard him?’

  ‘Yes, of course. You called me close. “Listen!” you said.’ She shuddered. ‘The blood was coming up, bubbling up out of his mouth. They were the last words he spoke. “Thank God they only got me. It was meant for you.”’

  ‘And so he died—for my sins,’ said the Grand Mysterioso, and again was silent. But he’s not sorry, really, thought the boy, crouched in his sofa corner, watching the big handsome old face heavy with sadness, and yet spread over with a sort of unction of self-satisfaction. ‘He’s pleased, underneath it all, that everyone should know that even at that age he could still be seducing girls, breaking up homes, getting threatening letters from husbands.’ And certainly in the ensuing years the ageing lion had done nothing to obliterate the public’s memory of that terrible, yet magnificent day. ‘I was so bloody mad, I forgot all about everything but Tom. Dying for my sins!’ In a hundred talks and broadcasts he lived it over again, mock regretful, mock remorseful (thought the young man) that a man should have died to pay for the triumphs of his own all-conquering virility. ‘I think you’re pleased,’ the boy said. ‘I think you’re proud of it. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have kept telling people about it all this time.’

  ‘He’s got you there, old boy,’ said the actress, Marguerite Devine, without venom. ‘Literally below the belt,’ she added, laughing, and then said: ‘Oh, I’m sorry, love!’ and laughed no more.

  ‘I know a lot about people,’ said the boy, and it was true; the insecurities of his childhood had heightened his perception—solitary, anti-social, he paid no lip service to conventional pretences, was not deceived by them. Life had accustomed him to be ready for the worst.

  ‘Well, the cheeky monkey!’ said the old man in a comic accent, trying to make light of it. Inspector Block asked patiently if they might now get on. ‘What happened next—’

  ‘I’ll tell what happened next,’ said the boy. ‘Because I know it.’ You could see the tense clutch of his hands, the tense pressure of his shabby shoes on the soft carpeting of Mysterioso’s room; his very skin colour had
changed, strangely darkened with hollows ringed round the bright eyes. He was coming now to the defence of his father. ‘My father was standing in the doorway where he’d been posted. I’ve heard him tell about it a hundred times; he was always telling it. He heard the shot fired and ran to the corner of the building and sent one glance at the site and saw what had happened—and don’t tell me that in that short time someone could have come out of the building and run away, because they couldn’t. Could they?’ He appealed to Inspector Block.

  ‘No,’ said Block. ‘In that short time, anyone shooting from the window where the gun was, could hardly even have reached the top of the stairs. Experiments were made.’

  ‘Well, all right, so he saw them both fall and he saw the crowd swing round and stare up at the building, so he knew where the shot must have come from and he turned back and ran into the building and up the stairs. He didn’t bother about the ground floor, because he knew the man couldn’t have got there yet; and anyway, it was just an open space, he could see that it was empty; and so was the second floor an empty space.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Block. ‘He acted perfectly wisely. Go on, you’re doing fine.’

  The tense darkened face gave him no thanks. ‘He went tearing up,’ said the boy, ‘and as he passed the first big window on the stairs looking across at the main building of the hospital, he saw people lying in beds and sitting in wheelchairs out on the first floor balcony—’

  They had sat very quiet and intent, those two who had been on the hospital balcony that day long ago—traced and brought here by the dramatic enthusiasm of the Grand Mysterioso to stand witness to what they had seen. ‘Yes, I remember it well,’ said the woman. ‘They’d wheeled us out there into the sunshine. Nothing to see, mind: the unfinished wing cut off the view of the park beyond, and of course, of the cornerstone. It would have been fun to lie there and watch the ceremony, but—well, we couldn’t see it. Still, it was nice to get a bit of fresh air. This gentleman was on the other side of the partition with others from Men’s Surgical. We were lying there quietly, dozing, enjoying the sunshine—’