Swing Low, Swing Death

by R. T. Campbell

  “Why didn’t ye remind me?” he demanded, “ye know there’s nothin’ I like so much as a party. An’ this sounds as though it might be quite a good party. Let’s get goin’.”

  I was still unwilling to venture forth, but I knew that I would have to go. The one consolation would be that we would be frightfully late and would miss all the speechifying. I pointed out that, dressed in a pair of dirty flannels and a short-sleeved shirt, I was not sartorially in keeping with a private-view. Besides, I had been working so hard all morning I had not had time to shave.

  “All right, all right,” he grumbled, “if ye want to be fussy about little things like that, ye can be. Go on now an’ change as quickly as ye can. I’ll be waitin’ for ye.”

  I wandered up the stairs to my rooms. As usual the chaos which had overflowed from downstairs seemed to have landed there. The trouble was that I had not had time to deal with my rooms, though I had dealt with the rest of the house, and during my absence my rooms seemed to have been used as a repository.

  I had to move a pile of calf-bound volumes of Abstracts of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society before I could get into the cupboard where I kept my suits. All the same, shaved and with my hair brushed, I was downstairs again in ten minutes.

  I went into the large workroom and found the Professor just laying down the telephone. There was a positively fiendish look of glee on his face. I knew that something had happened.

  “What’s up?” I asked, more in hope than in expectation of receiving a satisfactory reply. He closed one eye in one of his special brand of winks which contorts the whole of his face. He is under the impression that he can wink without anyone noticing it. I have suggested that he does it in front of a mirror sometime, but he never seems to get around to taking that action. “What’s up?” I repeated.

  “Ye’ll see,” was all he gave me in reply, “are ye ready to get crackin’, as I believe the sayin’ goes? Ha’ ye got yer winter woollies on an’ are ye ready for all eventualities?”

  “Yes,” I said shortly. It seems to me that sometimes the old man’s sense of humour stopped growing when he was in his preparatory school.

  As I feared the Professor would not let me ring up for a taxi. He insisted that he would drive me himself. Being driven by Professor Stubbs is no pleasure, no pleasure at all. Men of far greater courage than myself have winced when offered a lift by the old man, and those of really supreme braveness have rejected the offer.

  I climbed into the Bentley in fear and considerable trepidation. The old man crashed his gears with a careless abandon and we were off. Every time I travel in the car I think that hell can have no terrors worse than the journey I have just completed, and every time I realise that I have only reached the portal and that there are worse terrors to come.

  As jaunts with Professor Stubbs go this one was only medium bad—they are all bad, but there are degrees of badness. I only shut my eyes about half-a-dozen times and each time he extricated himself from an apparently imminent death with a degree of luck which only he enjoys.

  Bond Street, as usual, was crowded with traffic which crawled along at two miles an hour. It would have been too optimistic to hope that the old man would take his place in the queue. Not him, he cut in and out like a particularly agile snake. How he avoided the eyes of the traffic policemen I do not know. I never will know how he gets away with so much. He swivelled the car round a turning and we were in Iron Street.

  I knew there was something the matter when I saw two long black cars drawn up in front of the glaring white tower of the Museum of Modern Art. The Professor drew up behind one of these cars, missing its back bumper by a distance which could only be measured with a micrometer.

  A uniformed policeman stood between the Brancusi and the Moore carvings. There was a small crowd of idlers gathered in the street. The Professor piled out of the Bentley and I followed at a more leisurely pace. He went straight up to the policeman. I thought he would be refused admission, but he only hesitated for a second. I did not hear what he said but from past experience I would not have been surprised to have been told that he had said he was a special envoy from the Home Secretary. Professor Stubbs never lets a little thing like a trivial untruth stick in his way. We sailed through the white hall unencumbered.

  At the end of the hall there was a lift. The Professor looked at it doubtfully and sniffed.

  “We’ll walk,” he announced, “I never learned to trust these things. Once got stuck in one for two an’ a half hours. Wi’ three men bigger than meself an’ none of us had room to move. We had to take turns at breathin’. Let’s go up the stairs.”

  There was a little landing half-way up the stairs and the wall facing us looked as though it had been blasted by a rubbish heap. Tins and broken crockery were stuck in cement around Victorian valentines and horrible garish postcards conveying greetings for birthdays and so on.

  I wondered what the idea was. The Professor glanced at the wall but made no comment. He puffed on up the stairs. On the landing there seemed to be a convocation in being. There were three or four policemen and several people in ordinary clothes. From these latter a familiar figure detached itself. It was Douglas Newsome.

  “Hullo, Professor Stubbs,” he said, “and you, Max. Thank God you’ve come. Come and have a drink.”

  “That,” said the Professor heavily, “sounds like a sensible suggestion. I will have a drink.”

  We passed the uniformed policemen and went into a large gallery, hung with abstract and surrealist paintings. The place was pretty full. The crowd had gathered in a hard knot at one end of the room and at the other end there was a small collection, standing in front of a piece of drapery on the wall. I could see the plump figure of Chief Inspector Reginald F. Bishop. The Professor, I realised, saw him too, but he paid no attention. He lumbered heavily behind Douglas to a table laden with bottles and glasses. Behind the table there was a worried-looking waiter. Douglas obtained drinks from him.

  The three of us walked up the long room towards the hanging drapery.

  “My God,” said Chief Inspector Bishop, wearily and rudely, “look who’s here. Can’t you keep away, John, just to oblige a friend? Where there’s trouble I seem fated to find you. Who invited you along?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Douglas was nervous, “I’d invited Professor Stubbs and Max Boyle to the private-view and when this happened I rang up and asked if they were coming. The Professor said he was just starting.”

  “Umph,” the old man grunted, “ye needn’t look as though someone’d stolen your sweeties, Reggie. I got as much right here as ye have—more if it comes to that, for I got an invitation an’ I’ll bet ye didn’t. Come on now an’ tell us what it’s all about.”

  The Chief Inspector looked exceedingly tired. This I knew meant that he had not yet found out all about the case.

  “As a matter of fact, John,” he said listlessly, “I’ve just arrived. It seems that this place,” he waved his hand expansively, in such a way as to convey his impression that there was madness and madness and that this was the worst sort, “was being opened this afternoon and that one of the pictures, which had been newly acquired and not publicly shewn in this country was to be specially unveiled. Well, there was some nonsense about having a toy mouse pull the covering off it. That side of the business was worked by your friend there,” he looked at Douglas, “and the veil came off all right. The trouble is that behind the veil there was not only the picture they expected to see, but also the body of a Mr. Julian Ambleside. He was, it seems, a well-known dealer in modern pictures and the picture was one which had been acquired from him. He was hanging by his neck and it seems that he had been dead for at least twelve hours. I haven’t found out much else, yet. I haven’t had time.”

  “Oy,” said the Professor gustily, “was he murdered or did he string himself up?”

  “That,” the Chief Inspector was portentous, “is something about which we are not yet certain. But one thing is quite
obvious and that is that if he hanged himself someone else covered him up with the cloth. He could not have done it himself.”

  There was a slight stir at the door and three men came in. One of them was carrying a rolled-up canvas stretcher. They came up to the Chief Inspector and waited for orders.

  The Bishop looked around him and sighed heavily. “You’d better cut him down,” he said.

  The men advanced towards the hanging drapery. One of them gave it a twitch and it came down.

  Hanging against a surrealist picture was the body of a short, little man with a frog-like face. At least it looked frog-like to me, but I could not say whether that was not to some extent due to the suffusion of his face.

  One of the men put his arms round the body while another climbed on a chair, holding a sharp and efficient looking knife. He cut through the cord carefully a few inches from the top and the man below steadied himself to take the strain.

  As the rope parted the corpse expelled some air with a horrible sound. I heard various people in the crowd at the far end of the gallery gasp with horror.

  The man who held the body of Julian Ambleside lowered it carefully on to the stretcher which had been unrolled and placed in readiness by the third man. The police surgeon came forward and stooped over the body. Carefully, so as to preserve the knots in the rope, he loosened and removed it. He bent over the corpse more closely. He ran his hand over the dead flesh.

  “Chief Inspector,” he said suddenly, “take a look at this.”

  The Chief Inspector moved up beside him and Professor Stubbs who was never backward on such occasions came forward too. Seeing there was a general move in that direction I saw no reason why I should not also be a spectator of such mysteries as were to be propounded.

  “If you examine the neck carefully,” the police surgeon said, “I think you will agree with me that there is bruising which is not consistent with the rope alone. Of course, I cannot be certain, at least until I have performed an autopsy, but I would say that it is probable that this man was strangled before he was hanged. I might even go further and say that I think it is probable that he was manually strangled—that is that someone strangled him with their hands and not with a piece of rope or cloth.”

  “Careful cove, ain’t ye, Joe,” the Professor grunted, going down on one knee to have a closer look.

  The police-surgeon grinned. “You have to be careful in my profession, John,” he said. “It’s all very well for you amateurs to jump to conclusions straight away. If I started doing that I’d land myself out of my job in a week.”

  Professor Stubbs was mumbling to himself as he examined the corpse. “I’d say ye were right though, Joe,” he announced finally.

  “That’s handsome of you,” said the police-surgeon, “I’m glad to find that you agree with me for once.”

  The old man looked up to see if the police-surgeon was laughing at him. That worthy kept a perfectly straight face, and the Professor seemed satisfied.

  “How long did ye say he’d bin dead?” he asked, and the police-surgeon shrugged his shoulders.

  “Over twelve hours at a rough estimate,” he said, “you know how it is, you can’t be accurate on these things to within an hour or two. It’s only in thrillers that a doctor looking at a body can say that it was killed precisely at four-fifteen in the afternoon.”

  “Come to think of it,” said the old man rudely, “I don’t know what the police force employs doctors for. They’d get along just as well wi’out ’em, don’t you agree, Joe?”

  The little police-surgeon, who seemed to be determined that the Professor, whom he knew of old, should not ruffle him, grinned once more.

  “No doubt, John, they would,” he said, “but far better would it be if they could have a force made up entirely of Professor John Stubbs’s, eh?”

  The old man glared at him and straightened up. Down the room there came the most startling vision I think I have ever seen. It was a little woman dressed in a black cloak. She seemed to have been drinking. In one hand she held a large and very real-looking rat and in the other a half-empty bottle of lemon gin. She stopped half-way down the room to refresh herself.

  Wavering slightly she went up to Douglas.

  “Hullo, Douglas Cock, if that’s your name,” she said. “My guess is this rat did it. God knows what else it would have done if I hadn’t caught it.”

  Even the Professor looked slightly startled by this intervention. He looked a large question at Douglas.

  “This,” said Douglas, “is Mrs. Carr. She is a hundred-and-two and she caught the toy rat when I let it go.”

  “Let’s ha’ a look,” said the Professor reaching out for the rat. Mrs. Carr surrendered it unwillingly and the old man examined it carefully. I could see that it appealed to him. He is an absolute glutton for mechanical toys of all sorts. He insists that he has a mechanical mind. I suppose all great men suffer from some fallacious idea about their capabilities and this is Professor Stubbs’s failing. “I must say, ma’am,” he addressed Mrs. Carr politely, “that it was dam’ plucky o’ ye to tackle the thin’. I’d ha’ let it go meself, but then I’m frightened o’ rats.”

  “Oh, it’s easy enough when ye know the way how,” said Mrs. Carr helpfully, “to just swing ’em up and catch ’em by the tail in your teeth. Like this.”

  She proceeded to give a demonstration of the gentle art of rat-catching. I was so astounded that I could only look on in silence. The Professor seemed to be deeply interested. He took the rat from Mrs. Carr and tried to do as she had done. “Like this?” he asked.

  “No,” she said and did it again, “like this.”

  The Professor had another shot. Mrs. Carr looked sadly at her bottle and poured the few remaining dregs down her throat. She looked at the Professor’s antics with disgust and shook her head.

  “No,” she said, “we’ll never make a rat-catcher of you. Give me my rat.”

  The Professor surrendered it. He looked around rather guiltily at the group who, I could see, agreed with my feeling that with a corpse on the ground it was neither the time nor the place for lessons with a toy rat.

  “Very interestin’,” said the Professor, “well, where do we go from here? Who,” he addressed the Bishop, “murdered this feller an’ why? D’ye know yet? Come on, tell me?”

  The Chief Inspector let his sleepy eyelids fall on his cheeks. He sighed. “My dear John,” said said wearily, “if I knew who did this thing I would not be still here.”

  “I suppose not,” said the Professor, “unless o’ course ye were stayin’ in the hope o’ havin’ a drink. Come to think o’ it, now,” his face brightened, “I could do wi’ a drink meself. Be a good feller, Max, an’ go an’ collect one.”

  Accompanied by Douglas Newsome I went across to the temporary bar.

  “What the devil is all this about?” I asked Douglas, “I feel as though I had landed in the middle of a lunatic asylum.”

  “You have,” he replied gloomily, “and you’ve still got to meet the rest of the lunatics. Mrs. Carr is balmy enough but her son’s worse. He did the decor on the stairs—you know the mess of potage and tinnage. I,” he was slightly defiant, “like them though. They are the only people here who treat me as if I was a human being and not a repository of the fine arts or a drudge. You wait though till you meet Dr. Cornelius Bellamy. He’ll put the fear of God into you. He is a superior person and he does not like me. My trouble is I’m not superior. I’ll need to try taking lessons in it. If you’ll take my advice we’ll knock back a quick one here and take another drink back with us. We’ll need it.”

  As Douglas suggested I had a drink at the table and took another back, along with one for the Professor who stood in the centre of the group, looking, in his baggy grey trousers, rather like an elephant surrounded by pygmies.

  The stretcher bearers were pulling a white sheet over the remains of Julian Ambleside. They did not seem to be happy in their work. I handed the Professor his drink. He looked around r
ather as if wondering whether he should propose a toast. He decided against it and took a pull at the glass.

  Chapter 2

  The Joys of a Strange Hour

  DR. CORNELIUS BELLAMY seemed to me to be a frightful ass. His long face only wanted a pair of long ears to complete the transformation. He sat in Emily Wallenstein’s office looking pompous and benign. I’d rather he had looked anything else. He was carefully posed behind a desk of ebonite and steel. His finger tips were joined and he looked round us. His look conveyed two things; first that he did not like our company and that there was nothing which could be said in our defence and second that, if we had to ask questions (a point upon which he seemed doubtful) there was no person in the world so fitted to give us the correct and really appropriate answers as Dr. Cornelius Bellamy.

  I dare say that I was wrong in feeling this before the man had done more than look at me with visible distaste, but in these accounts of the various exploits of my boss, Professor John Stubbs, I do my best to be pretty honest about my feelings. After all, I am usually around with the old man and so I meet the same people as he does and, as the reader sees him through my eyes, I don’t see why he shouldn’t have my feelings too. The intolerance which I display or the tolerance, may help him discount or justify my portrait of the Professor.

  Anyhow, Dr. Bellamy sat there, looking as if the whole world might be wrong, but he was bound to be right. He examined the tips of his clean fingers and rubbed a slight roughening of one nail with the thumb of the other hand. He looked up at us as if we were a lot of juvenile delinquents waiting for judgment and his roving eye settled on the Chief Inspector.

  “Ah, yes, Sergeant,” he said and beside me I could feel the Bishop’s fur beginning to rise, “Ah, yes, Sergeant,” he repeated the offence, “I dare say that the surroundings which your—ah—vocation has brought you are most unfamiliar. After all,” he appealed to the rest of the company, “we cannot expect the honest—ah—bobby,” he looked at the Bishop as if inviting something in the way of applause for his witticism, “to appreciate the finer manifestations of the finest minds and imaginations of our time. I forget who it was—probably the late D. H. Lawrence—who observed that one of the most ridiculous sights known to mankind was the policeman as art critic. Well, Sergeant,” he was interrupted by Professor Stubbs.