Dancers in Mourning

by Margery Allingham

  The tall houses, their stained sides and chipped stucco hidden in the lamplit half-light, rose up with all their original Georgian symmetry and only the brightly lighted scenes within their many uncurtained windows betrayed their descent in the social scale of an unfaithful city. It was all very quiet and homely and forgotten.

  Campion found the number he sought and pressed open the elegant but unpainted gate. The hall door under the square porch with the pillars stood open and a single dusty bulb within cast a grudging light upon worn dark oilcloth and patched, buff-painted walls.

  The lower windows were in darkness, but from somewhere far above a wireless set whimpered, its programme maddeningly just out of earshot.

  Campion pulled the bell and at the far end of the hall, at the foot of a short flight of stairs, a square of bright light appeared, only to vanish again immediately. He waited and after a time the door opened once more and crisp footsteps came hurrying towards him.

  The woman was not entirely unexpected, in type at any rate. She was small and brisk, her hair elaborately dressed in an old-fashioned style and her silk dress enlivened at neck and elbows with little bits of white lace. Mr Campion took his courage in his hands and threw away his discretion.

  ‘It’s about Miss Pye,’ he said. ‘Could I have a word or two with you?’

  He was lucky. He knew it the moment he had spoken. She came out to look up at him, and the light from the street lamp opposite the gate fell upon her face, showing it to be small and shrewd, with bright eyes and a turned-up nose which had been much admired in the nineties.

  ‘Why, yes,’ she said, glancing behind her with the gesture of a conspirator. ‘Come along to my kitchen. We shan’t be disturbed there.’

  She took his sleeve and pulled him after her, her skirts rustling as she hurried.

  ‘There,’ she said as they came into a neat little room, bright in spite of its utilitarianism. ‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable. It’s not very swanky but it’s cosy and clean.’

  She had a pretty laugh with a catch of real gaiety in it, and her friendliness contained the whole art of the hostess.

  ‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said, smiling at him, ‘but you seem a nice boy. Did you know Chloe? Poor girl, what a finish! And she thought she was on velvet …. Have a drop of stout? It’s all I’ve got in the house at the moment. Nonsense! You will. Of course you will.’

  She bustled over to the dresser and, looking at her in the uncompromising light, he judged her to be about sixty, but alert and very pleased with herself and not, at heart, much older than she had ever been.

  The panel over the shelf above the range was papered with stage photographs, and as she turned with the glasses she caught him looking at them.

  ‘There I am, on the left,’ she said. ‘The one with the saucy little bow. Don’t pretend you’ve heard of me, because you haven’t. You were in crawlers when I was kicking my heels about. Renée Roper, that’s the name. Don’t worry – I never came to the West End. I did my dirty work on tour. Now what’s all this about Chloe, poor girl? You were a boy-friend, I suppose?’

  Mr Campion hesitated.

  ‘Well, not exactly. I knew her very slightly, as a matter of fact. But I was interested in her and I wanted to know more about her.’

  ‘She doesn’t owe you money?’

  Her intelligent eyes became suddenly hard and he hastened to reassure her.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Nothing like that. Frankly, I’ve got no business to come to you at all. But the fact is, she had something I wanted to know about and –’

  ‘Don’t tell me any more.’ The woman leaned across the table to pat his arm. ‘I understand. All her things are going to those terrible relations. And you’ve got a wife. So if there was a letter or two from you lying around it might be very awkward. Don’t go into it, my boy. You’re not the first good-looking youngster who’s come to me in the same sort of trouble, I can tell you. I’ll take you up to her room in a moment and you can have a look round. I can’t do it for a minute or two, so finish your drink. Don’t you say a word to anybody, mind, because if that woman Pole got to hear of it I’d never have a moment’s peace.’

  Mr Campion looked embarrassed. It was hardly the story he would have thought of himself, but in view of all the circumstances it seemed cavalier to refute it.

  Renée Roper mistook his silence.

  ‘They’ll be there if they’re not destroyed,’ she said and added, a practical touch overlying her good humour, ‘if I know Chloe they will be there. I won’t say a word against her now she’s gone, poor thing, but we weren’t exactly old pals. She rented my little box-room at the top of the house when she was away and usually when she was in London she took my first floor duo. Very nice it is. Practically a bathroom as well.’

  ‘Have you known her long, Mrs —?’

  ‘Miss,’ she corrected him and sat smiling, her eyes bright. ‘They never married me, duck,’ she said and her laugh was gurgling and happy as a child’s. ‘Oh dear me, those were the days. Let’s see, I’ve known Chloe on and off for ten or eleven years and I haven’t known her well. She wasn’t my type. She was all right, though, and you probably knew the best side of her.’

  Mr Campion looked interested but unintelligent, and she surveyed him quizzically.

  ‘Men tired of her very quickly,’ she said and there was a question in her tone to which he did not respond, so that she went on hastily. ‘She had plenty of boys. I’ll say that, but they saw through her after a week or two. I am a cat! I don’t really mean that. Yes I do, though. Be honest, Renée. She was spiteful and mean and a sight too possessive for my taste. I’ll say it even if she is dead, poor, poor thing. Mind you,’ she added, refilling her glass after a sharp glance to see that her visitor was still well supplied, ‘while they were in love with her they’d give her the top brick off the chimney. While it lasted she was the ace all right.’

  Mr Campion was leading up to a few delicate questions concerning the identity of his supposed rivals, but he was forestalled. Miss Roper was safely embarked on a flood of gossip.

  Chloe Pye had favoured wealthy men friends, it seemed, especially in her latter years. Since she had mainly appeared in vaudeville she had not been thrown in close contact with her own profession and had acquired most of her admirers from what was, in Miss Roper’s frank opinion, the wrong side of the footlights.

  ‘She was proud when she was up and frantic when she was down,’ she summed up. ‘There’s plenty like her and they’re not all on the stage. When she had a place in the West End – and she did from time to time – she’d be as starchy as you please when she called round to fetch something from the box-room, but she was very different when she first came home from abroad, broke to the wide. Before she got a shop at the Argosy she was very nervy.’

  She nodded to emphasise her point and her small face, which was still cheeky in spite of her age, wore a serious confidential expression.

  ‘That’s a fact,’ she said.

  Cautious footsteps on the linoleum-covered stairs outside caught her attention and she sprang up.

  ‘There’s that woman down at last,’ she announced. ‘Wait a moment.’

  She trotted out, her elaborately-dressed head held high and her dress rustling consequentially.

  There was much whispering outside in the hall, and presently she came back alone. She was smiling.

  ‘They’re having a time at the theatre,’ she said. ‘They’ve been nervy there for some time and now this looks like a real bit of bad luck. Actors are a superstitious lot. That woman was from the Argosy. She brought back a lot of Chloe Pye’s things from her dressing-room. Between you and me I think the management’s had a taste or two of Chloe’s relations and doesn’t want ’em nosing around backstage. This girl said she’d take the stuff up, so I gave her the keys. That’s why you had to wait.’

  Mr Campion’s eyes grew blank.

  ‘From the theatre?’ he inquired, relapsing for a moment into t
he protective inanity of his early youth. ‘An actress?’

  Miss Roper chuckled.

  ‘No, ducky,’ she said. ‘Not every woman employed round a theatre is an actress, by a long chalk. I don’t know what this girl’s job is, but you can take it from me she’s not an actress. A little boiled cart-horse, that’s what she looks like. A secretary or something, on the theatre management side, perhaps. She told me her name – Finlay, or Finborough, or something. Well now, are you coming up to find those little billets-doux of yours?’

  He followed her quick light footsteps up the stairs to the big square room which, with the little bedroom behind it, took up the whole of the first floor. It was much the kind of room he would have expected; bright with chintz and dusty hangings. It had a three-piece suite arranged round the fireplace and over the mantel was an ill-drawn sketch of Chloe in costume, carefully framed and signed with a flourish.

  The other pictures varied between the sentimentally lewd and the illustrated Scotch joke variety wherein glengarried dogs take the place of figures. There were no books and a small writing-table with drawers was the only sign of mental activity.

  The landlady sniffed.

  ‘Soon gets musty, doesn’t it?’ she said cheerfully. ‘Like to open a window for me?’

  While he did so she went over to the desk.

  ‘Hullo!’ she said. ‘You’re not the first, my boy. The girl from the theatre has done a bit of looking round, too. See, the drawers aren’t quite closed and someone’s been through them pretty quickly.’

  She displayed the tousled contents of the top drawer with growing amusement.

  ‘They were all tidy when I brought her laundry up this afternoon,’ she said, ‘and I happen to know because I took a peep. I don’t mind telling you I was looking to see if there was any loose cash about. She owes me a week or so and I thought I’d like to be sure it was there before me and that sister-in-law of hers came to high words. There wasn’t a halfpenny, of course. Not that I’d have taken it. At least I don’t think I would. Certainly not more than I was owed. Although God knows I’ve given her plenty in her time. Here, I wonder if she’s been up in the box-room too? I gave her the key. Come on.’

  The visitor had been in the box-room. After careful consideration of the two tin trunks of old letters, programmes and picture postcards which were up there, Miss Roper pronounced her opinion that the woman had gone through them with a ‘quick toothcomb’.

  ‘What d’you know about that?’ she said, her eyes widening and a mischievous smile hovering at the corners of her lips. ‘Some people have got a nerve, haven’t they? I wonder what she was after, the cat …. Doing a kindness for one of the fellows in the company, I’ll bet!’

  She chuckled hugely.

  ‘You’re not the only one, ducky. There’s dozens of you! Well now, what about these letters of yours? That Pole woman will go all through this lot. It’ll broaden her mind for her perhaps.’

  The notion seemed to delight her and Campion, who realised that his work had already been done for him by Miss Finbrough, sought about for some plausible way out of the situation.

  ‘I don’t think I need bother,’ he said. ‘My – er – what I was looking for evidently isn’t here.’

  Her quick eyes took in his expression and once more she gave her own explanation to his words.

  ‘Oh, you were a real writer, were you?’ she said. ‘I know … great piles of stuff all on the same sort of writing-pad. Reams and reams of it! I know. That’s the kind that gets destroyed, my boy. No girl wants to take round a pantechnicon. You needn’t have worried. It’s the little dangerous half-sheets that get kept. Who’s going to wade through a life-story every time they want cheering up? Well, now that your mind’s at rest, come on. Let’s go down.’

  As they descended through the great shadowy house, whose elegance was departed for ever, she went on to talk about the accident.

  ‘One of the Brock Brothers, on my second floor, said it sounded like suicide to him from the papers,’ she remarked. ‘The jury didn’t have enough to go on, or something. But if there’s one thing I am sure of, it wasn’t that. Chloe never killed herself. She was far too conceited, if you know what I mean. Besides, I ask you! There she was safe in a nice long run, starred and everything. She had never done so well for herself – never! If you ask me, she had a nice fat pull with that management, because she was going off. That’s got to be faced. She wasn’t the nice little girl you knew, you know. She was forty-two to my certain knowledge. It didn’t sound to you like suicide, did it?’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ he assured her absently. ‘I was down there at the time.’

  ‘Really?’ She pounced on the admission. ‘You saw the accident? Well, that is a mercy. You’re just the boy I want. I wonder if I could ask you to have a few words with one of my lodgers? It’d be a Christian act and help me a lot. I’m worried out of my mind about him. A word from someone who actually saw it might make all the difference.’

  Mr Campion hesitated, but to refuse her would have been more than churlish. She dragged him into the kitchen again.

  ‘You sit down and have a drink and I’ll fetch him,’ she said, forcing him to a chair. ‘He’s only a boy, just down from college. Oxford or Cambridge – I forget which. And, of course, he’s writing a play and renting my attic. I think he’s got a little money, but he says he gets the right atmosphere here, and so I do what I can for him. It’s probably a dreadful play. You can tell it’s old-fashioned by the mere fact that he wants to write it in an attic. I tell him that, but you know what these college kids are – I don’t know what they teach ’em at those places; they just seem to keep ’em a steady thirty years behind the times, as far as I can see – but I want you to talk to him because Chloe got at him. I won’t say what I think of her for doing it. She was old enough to be his auntie. He thinks she was I don’t know what and this has bowled him clean over, poor kid. He won’t eat and he can’t sleep. He’s half enjoying it, mind you, but it’s not good for him. He’s got it into his head that she committed suicide and he’s to blame.’

  She laughed, but her face softened.

  ‘Aren’t they wonderful at that age? If you told him he was too sure of himself by half he’d either not believe you or cut his throat. Just see him and tell him it was an ordinary accident. Be a dear – to please me.’

  She went out before he could protest, even had he wished to do so, but put her head round the door again to whisper an admonition.

  ‘Don’t laugh at him. He’s very unhappy. He’s only been in love once before and she was a girl in a shop, who reminded him of the dame sans mercy. From what he’s told me she was more like Ophelia. Anaemic, anyway.’

  She disappeared again and was gone for some considerable time. Campion stood by the kitchen table and thought about Miss Finbrough and the one person in the world for whom she would have come on so questionable an errand. He wondered what she had found in her brief search.

  Miss Roper’s returning footsteps recalled him to the matter in hand. The door opened and she came hurrying in, her face pink and motherly.

  ‘Here’s Mr Peter Brome to see you,’ she said briskly. ‘I know you’ll like to have a chat.’

  Campion glanced over her head at the young man who came so unwillingly into the brightly-lit room. He was very young and very handsome in the downy, small boy fashion of his kind. At the moment his face was unnaturally grave and he conveyed the impression that he was holding himself with particular care, as if his grief was some great over-full pitcher which he was carrying and which any jolt must spill. It gave him a curious clumsy and unsteady air, embarrassing both to himself and to those about him. He wore an old tweed sports jacket which hung limply on wide, flat shoulders, and the highly-polished pipe which he gripped, as though it were both his mainstay and his passport, was unfilled.

  He towered over Miss Roper, who was clearly delighted with him, and addressed Mr Campion in a naturally deep voice which an effort towards maturity had r
endered positively sepulchral.

  ‘How do you do?’ he said. ‘I don’t know your name.’ The baldness of the statement seemed to worry him and he added, ‘not that it matters,’ and blushed violently at the ungraciousness of his own words.

  In view of the delicacy of his mission, Mr Campion gave his second-best name and they shook hands solemnly. There fraternisation came to an abrupt stop. Peter Brome moved stiffly and purposefully across the kitchen until he came to the wall, where he turned round and took up a position too nonchalant to be real and barely safely balanced.

  Miss Roper looked at Campion appealingly.

  ‘Tell him about the accident,’ she commanded. ‘He wants to know.’

  ‘No. No, please!’ Peter Brome’s gesture was unwieldy but emphatic, and his deep voice was quite expressionless. He looked desperately uncomfortable and Mr Campion felt very old.

  ‘Come out and have a drink,’ he suggested.

  Mr Brome’s embarrassment increased beyond dignity’s endurance point.

  ‘You ought to have a drink with me,’ he said and his grave and unhappy eyes met Campion’s own.

  ‘My dear fellow, let’s have several drinks,’ persisted Mr Campion, resenting the one-foot-in-the-grave sensation which was stealing over him.

  ‘You’d better not hang about or they’ll be shut,’ put in Miss Roper with practical cheerfulness. ‘Off you go. If I don’t see you again, then, my boy, good-bye and good luck. I’m pleased to have met you. Not a word to Mrs You Know Who and you can trust little Renée. Good-bye, my dears. Don’t fall in the canal coming home.’

  She bundled them out into the soft, warm night and waved to them as they reached the gate.

  Mr Campion and his hatless companion walked down the paper-strewn pavement, the wind behind them.

  Peter Brome shook back his locks, which were more untidy than strictly Byronic, and looked up at the sky tattered by the dark irregularities of the housetops. Campion wondered uncharitably if he knew the lamplight was shining on his magnificent profile and decided in all honesty that probably he did not.