Sergeant Bedd staggered to his feet, holding his throat. Charlesworth finished dusting his hands; Inspector Cockrill drew deeply on a shabby cigarette. ‘Well—now all that’s left is to discover what’s happened to Anderson,’ said Charlesworth, girt for further action.
‘And to make an arrest, sir?’ said Sergeant Bedd, hopefully.
‘And to make an arrest: I should think so, Inspector, wouldn’t you?’
Cockie considered. ‘As you say, we must first find out what’s happened to Anderson.’
‘Did anyone speak to him except Perpetua Kirk, last night?’
‘Not that Perpetua Kirk did speak to him,’ said Cockie.
‘Good lord, yes, she did.’
‘The evidence is that she told Miss Betchley he was there. That’s all.’
‘Well, may be she didn’t speak to him: may be she only saw him.’
‘If she even saw him,’ said Cockie, being difficult. ‘Miss Betchley was outside in the corridor, fussing. Peppi Kirk was at the Assembly room door. She said words to the effect that he was there all the time: he must be changing. Isn’t it possible that she simply glanced at the peg where his armour should have been hanging, saw that it wasn’t there, and assumed that he’d taken it out to the stables and was changing?’
Charlesworth felt that it was all rather splitting hairs, and that considering what Perpetua had later suffered, it did not very much matter whether she had or had not heard from Earl Anderson’s own lips that he was now going to the stables or a dressing room to shuffle into his armour. But the old boy seemed to make a great Thing of it. He said at last: ‘Well, I’ll tell you what—I must go back to the Yard now and thrash this thing out, so we’ll take Miss Kirk in on the way and ask her. Besides, after that last note, we ought to warn her about the present development, and what she’s got to watch out for.’ Cockrill folded his short legs into the front seat of the little car, and nursing his hat on his knees, was driven up to Bayswater.
‘Jolly decent of you to give me that hint, sir,’ was the gratifying burden of young Charlesworth’s song. ‘I daresay I’d have come round to it, but there’s a hell of a lot to think about when one’s on the case sort of—officially…’ (All very well to potter around and build up neat theories in the intervals of some tin-pot conference…!)
Over the cup of tea and no tea-cake, Perpetua was confiding to her new gallant the story of the note that had arrived with the morning’s post. ‘Who then, Perpetua, can have sent this letter?’
‘I’ve no idea. The police have got it of course, and apparently it was posted last night: but anybody could have put it in a letter-box on the way home after the exhibition, or just before they came in. It was posted from the local box.’
‘Can they tell nothing from the writing of it?’
‘Well, I suppose they’ll check all the typewriters any of us could have had access to.’
‘We all have access to a thousand typewriters, Peppi. Any of us can go to a typewriter shop and try one or two machines. No need to write every time “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.’
There was a postman’s double knock, and at the same time Cockie and Bedd and Charlesworth arrived, Charlesworth carrying a brown paper parcel. ‘Have you been buying a dizzy new hat, Miss Kirk? Or who’s sending you a fancy bouquet? We rescued this from the postman and brought it along to you.’
Cockie could not help hoping that it was not a hat. Once there had been a hat: Francesca Hart’s absurd little nonsense of a hat, found perched on the head of a dead woman… He hadn’t made a muck of that case, anyway: or had he? He said, ‘Mr. Charlesworth has something to ask you, Peppi. And something to tell you.’
‘Yes, Mr. Charlesworth?’ said Peppi, rather absently, longing to know what was in the parcel, since she had purchased no hat. Her fingers fiddled impotently with the cords.
Brian Bryan took it out of her hands. ‘I do it for you.’ Charlesworth asked about her having seen Anderson.
‘No, I didn’t see him. I just didn’t see his armour.’ It was all exactly as that astute old devil had said.
Brian Bryan and Perpetua sat staring while Charlesworth outlined the method of the murder. ‘I thought I ought to explain this to you, and warn you, Miss Kirk,’ said Charlesworth solemnly. ‘You had that warning note to-day: and as long as Earl Anderson’s at large, you’re bound to be in danger.’
‘We can’t really make an arrest, Peppi, you see,’ explained Cockrill, ‘until Earl Anderson’s found.’ He thought Scotland Yard a trifle indiscreet, to say the least of it: but it was no business of his.
‘Well, hardly,’ said Charlesworth.
‘I know: that’s just what I’m saying.’
Brian and Peppi sat staring at them both. Brian had the cardboard box on his knees, and his neat fingers picked automatically at the strings; but he had forgotten it. ‘What are you gentlemen saying…?’
People were extraordinarily slow in the uptake, really. Charlesworth got to his feet and collected his hat. ‘We’re just warning Miss Kirk: because of that second note she got this morning. Wherever he is, he’s still got it in for her evidently; but don’t worry, Miss Kirk, we shall be watching the place for him and you’ll be safe enough. And as long as you realize that the murderer was Earl Anderson…’
‘Earl Anderson?’ said Cockie. ‘Who on earth said anything about Earl Anderson?’
‘The murderer, you fool,’ said Charlesworth. ‘What else have we been talking about all this time? The murderer. The Red Knight. Earl Anderson.’
Perpetua put out her hand—idly, almost blindly, not thinking of what she was doing, thinking only of Earl: and lifted the lid of the box, glancing incuriously at what it contained. A fold of tissue paper: and under that—pale and transparent, with tiny figures of fighter aeroplanes—or were they really seagulls upside down?—Earl’s bathroom curtains! She stood staring down at them; they all stared down blankly; and still her mind had no room for amazement, it was so full of the thought of Earl—of Earl, whom one had known so well, Earl whom in a dazed way one had been so fond of, Earl who at least had always been kind—and now was a murderer. Charlesworth said again: ‘The Red Knight: the murderer—Earl Anderson!’ and she lifted the covering fold of curtain material…
Dark hair. A leaden face. A horrible smear of blood, congealed and black… And Earl Anderson’s witless blue eyes stared back into her own.
Chapter IX
A COURTING COUPLE, ARMS entwined, had sat down upon the torso of Earl Anderson under a bush on the evening after Isabel’s murder: and never felt quite the same towards one another again. It was lying in a patch of deep grass just off the main road to Maidenhead, and with it was a perfectly ordinary bread knife, the blade red and rusted, the handle so charred—doubtless deliberately—as to prevent any possible identification. There was no blood upon the scene nor any sign of a struggle; there were one or two footprints no longer very clear, and apparently made by the victim’s own shoes, which lay chucked down beside the body; and what with one thing and another, the experts decided that the man had been dead not more than forty-eight hours, possibly a great deal less. ‘Rigor begins in the head and neck, you see, old boy… And in this case the neck…’ It was all very unattractive.
Charlesworth shifted wretchedly about the chilly little mortuary. ‘Can’t you give me anything more definite?’
‘Have a heart man, I’ve only just arrived from my breakfast, to be confronted with your assorted heads and bodies.’
Charlesworth leaned over to look at the disembowelled torso on the slab. ‘No question of the wrong head on the wrong body, or anything like that?’
‘My dear Mr. Chesterton—spare us your pretty fancies! We haven’t got half a dozen headless bodies knocking around; not this week we haven’t. You’ve found a head, and you’ve found a body—and by the oddest coincidence, they match.’
‘You don’t know anything about pretty fancies till you’ve been in on the Isabel Drew case,’ said Charles
worth gloomily. ‘As if towers and knights in armour and Biblical analogies weren’t sufficient, I’ve got a little imp of a man called Cockrill making my life hideous, forestalling my every thought, not to mention a few thoughts I don’t have.’
Littlejohn, the pathologist, suggested comfortably that Inspector Cockrill made something of a speciality in decapitations, didn’t he? He flicked an enquiring finger at the slab. ‘Why this one? Do you know yet?’
‘The murderer’s trying to frighten and upset this poor girl: and you can’t send whole bodies through the post—there’s a fifteen pound limit or something. I presume the cause of death wasn’t the beheading?’
‘I haven’t had enough time with him yet to be certain: but, no, I shouldn’t think so. Off the record I should say that he was batted on the head first with the regulation blunt instrument—he’s got a hell of a bruise on the back of his nut. Then strangled—throttled from the back, probably, same as the girl—these people always repeat themselves: and then the head was taken off quite soon after. Whoever it was just hacked away with a knife—nothing skilled about it. It would be frightfully difficult to do, actually—a horrible job. I should say he took quite a bit of time about it.’
‘He? Could a woman have done it?’
‘Anyone could have done it, old boy: whether or not a woman would have—but I suppose that’s just sentimentality. A good hard bonk on the back of the head—that’s child’s play. The throttling took a lot of strength, but if the man’s unconscious it would just be a matter of finding the right grip and hanging on tight till he caved in. And then as I say, this business with the knife. I’ll get it all nice and official for you by lunchtime.’
Charlesworth met the infuriating Inspector Cockrill in a tea place opposite. ‘How the hell does one get hold of the waitress without calling her “Miss”?’
Cockrill got hold of her at once, having no such inhibitions. They ordered coffee. ‘I’ve been on the mat this morning,’ said Charlesworth, ruefully. ‘My Chief is pretty unreasonable, I consider. He seems to think I ought to have somehow prevented this—this Salome act.’
‘Earl Anderson’s head on a charger?’
‘Only it was really more off the charger, wasn’t it?’ said Charlesworth, pleased by this flight of fancy. ‘Except that the charger was only an old circus pony, actually.’
‘Anyway, your Chief thinks you ought to have done something about it?’
‘Well, apparently. Though how I could have prevented it, I don’t quite see. I was looking for a man alive or dead: but not by the portion, I must admit. I suppose,’ said Charlesworth gloomily, spreading his toast with the pallid grape-fruit jelly striped with raw carrot which here, as in so many similar establishments, passed as marmalade, ‘that you knew all along that Anderson’s head, wrapped up in his bathroom curtains, was on its way to Perpetua Kirk via the penny post?’
‘No,’ said Cockie. ‘I didn’t know about the head. I thought it probable that Anderson was dead.’
‘Because of the mystery Knight upon the Left?’
‘As far as Isabel was concerned, the knight on her left was Earl Anderson,’ said Cockrill. ‘So why the Mystery?’ He repeated the little verse again:
‘Oh, Isabel, how beautiful thy face is!
It brings out homage in unexpected places.
And so the donor of this little gift
Is who? The Mystery Knight upon the left,’
He said: ‘It told one such a lot: didn’t it?’
‘Good lord, yes,’ said Charlesworth, fervently. (Most illuminating!)
‘The first thing that struck one was that Isabel Drew was not the person to carry around a bit of nonsense like that next to her heart—I mean, that she’d just shoved it down her front for somewhere to keep it. That argued that she had received the note some time since she had put on that particular dress, and even if she’d got it in her dressing room, she’d surely have just put it into her handbag. As I said at the time, the very wording of the note seemed to suggest that it was sent to her, or left somewhere for her—not handed to her by the writer. So all in all there was—well, a certain amount of reason to suggest that the note and the brooch had been left for her in the tower. No proof, of course.’
‘And no proof that the brooch was actually the “gift”!’
‘Well, no. But she wasn’t wearing any other jewelry: and the fact that the pin of the brooch had gone through the paper did seem to suggest that she first stuffed the note down her bodice and then pinned the brooch into her frock over it. And it was a brand new piece of jewelry.’
‘She then marched up to the balcony and leaned well out…?’
‘To see the “Mystery Knight”…’
‘Who was not Earl Anderson,’ said Charlesworth. He added thoughtfully, however: ‘Except that there was this point about Isabel’s beauty bringing out homage in unexpected places. Well, Earl Anderson was an unexpected place to find homage to Isabel’s beauty. He’d been indifferent to it for years. Supposing he’d suddenly been struck all of a heap—he’d expect Isabel to be surprised at finding devotion coming from him.’
‘He’d also expect her to be surprised at diamond brooches coming from him: and rightly so. Earl Anderson was an out of work actor,’ said Cockie, with the simple scorn of those who if not actors, have at least never been out of work, ‘so far reduced that he had accepted a job riding around in phoney armour at four-pounds-ten a week. And this was a brooch of pretty considerable value.’
‘It might have been his Mum’s old heirloom or Aunt Jemima’s legacy: “never part with this, Earl, my boy, except to the Woman you Make your Wife…”’
‘It might if it had not been a 1948 model,’ said Cockie.
‘Yes,’ said Charlesworth. Maddening little man!
Inspector Cockrill reached for his shabby hat and thrust it on to his head, evidently only by way of keeping it out of the way while he unhitched his shabby mackintosh from the back of a neighbouring chair. He flung the coat over his shoulder, rose to his feet and called out simply: ‘Miss!’
‘I’ll do this,’ said Charlesworth hastily, shuddering a little at this bold frontal attack.
‘No, no,’ said Cockie. He calculated the bill in his head and scrupulously contributed his share.
They walked off up the street together; a tall slim young man in a worn, but well-cut suit, and a little elderly man with stove-pipe trousers, a mackintosh trailing over one shoulder, and a battered felt hat at a rakish angle on a magnificent head. ‘And of course nobody ever did see Anderson at Elysian Hall that day,’ said Cockie, continuing the conversation as though it had not been interrupted by the paying of the bill. ‘Perpetua pointed out that his armour had been removed: but anybody might have removed it and at that very moment was probably putting it on. The best disguise in the world—a suit of armour.’
‘Except a diving suit,’ said Charlesworth.
Inspector Cockrill looked cross. ‘In this case, the introduction of a diving suit would have struck a very outré note: I think we can eliminate any such suggestion.’ He shifted his mackintosh on his shoulder and branched off abruptly across the street. ‘I’ll leave you here: I’m supposed to be attending a conference!’ You tried to knock sense into the young dunderhead and he started rambling off about diving suits! These modern boys…
George Exmouth had been to call on Perpetua Kirk: but Peppi was prostrate after last night’s appalling shock, and receiving nobody: besides, added the garrulous charlady, there was a gentleman already with her. Ever so lovely, it seemed, the gentleman was; and foreign too. George handed in a large bunch of flowers and wandered miserably away. He felt very odd: he had not slept all night and his brain was going round and round in the most peculiar fashion. And when he got home, there was The Police, waiting for him. He sat down on the okapi-skin divan and put his poor, young, aching head in his hands.
Charlesworth explained his errand. Mr. Exmouth had heard that Earl Anderson…?
Too horrible, sa
id George, his fingers plunged deeply into his soft, rather spikey brown hair.
The police had come to Mr. Exmouth for help. Of course there was still the possibility that Earl Anderson had murdered Isabel Drew—by a method so far known only to Detective Inspector Charlesworth and a Chosen Few—and had himself been murdered afterwards, possibly by way of revenge. But he had not been seen since the evening before Isabel’s murder; and that being so, the suggestion being that he was already dead when Isabel was killed, the question now was—who had taken his place in the pageant? George Exmouth had followed the Red Knight in their cavortings round the stage before Isabel’s murder: had sat astride the horse facing him across the archway for perhaps a full minute just before she fell. Had Mr. Exmouth anything to suggest that might help in identification—might help to confirm identification…?
George stared open-mouthed. ‘You mean somebody—somebody else was in Anderson’s armour? Anderson wasn’t in the pageant at all? Somebody had killed him so as to take his place…?’
‘Somebody had killed him anyway: and taken his place.’
‘But that could have been anybody,’ said George wildly. ‘Anybody!’
‘Well, not exactly. It couldn’t have been you, for example, because you were on your horse: and it couldn’t have been Brian Bryan because he was on his horse, and it couldn’t have been any of the other nine knights. On the other hand, it must have been someone familiar with the routine of the pageant; and someone who could go in and out of the Assembly room and not be particularly noted.’ Which left only Perpetua Kirk…
‘It wasn’t Perpetua,’ said George quickly. Since it was unlikely that they would take his simple word for it, he pointed out that all this time Perpetua was tied up and locked away in the little room.
Charlesworth obligingly disallowed Perpetua. ‘Which leaves Susan Betchley: and Mr. Port. And Miss Betchley was on the other side of a bolted door.’
Death of Jezebel Page 11