Swing Low, Swing Death

by R. T. Campbell

  Varley nodded his head wisely. He looked towards the papers on his desk. I could see that he was anxious to return to his work. The old man realised this too. He rose slowly to his feet. I felt that he looked very out of place in Varley’s exquisite room, where everything was as tidy as it was untidy at home.

  “I wonder,” he said to Varley, “if ye’d mind if I used yer telephone for a few minutes. I want to find out if the Chief Inspector knows where the Chiricos came from.”

  “Certainly,” Varley pointed to the ivory phone on the corner of his desk. The Professor looked at me with beseeching eyes and I went forward and dialed the number for him. He is quite incapable when it comes to dealing with a telephone and this in spite of his continually reiterated claim to have a mechanical mind.

  He took the phone from me and growled into it. He got hold of the Chief Inspector but the conversation was short and brief. He put the receiver down with a crash and turned a gloomy face towards me.

  “No,” he said, “they have not found anything about Chiricos. It seems that Ambleside did not bother to note down what it was that he had bought, but just entered a sum of money in his books, which were not, strictly speaking, books at all, but merely memoranda for his own use. I suppose that he knew what each entry stood for and that was enough for him.”

  Varley seemed to be about to say something. He opened his lips and then shut them again. The Professor noticed this but made no comment. He took a last look round the room and lumbered towards the door.

  I followed him down the stairs. He climbed into the Bentley and I followed him even there. I did not know where he intended to go next and I doubt if he had any real idea himself. However, we landed up at Scotland Yard.

  The Chief Inspector could hardly have been described as looking very delighted to see us. He looked at us through eyes which seemed half asleep and sighed bitterly.

  “What have I done,” he demanded from the cornice, “to deserve this unholy visitation?”

  Professor Stubbs looked at him with vigorous distaste.

  “Here am I,” he yowled, “doin’ me best to help out, an’ all ye can do is to blinkin’ well insult me. I got an idea in me head an’ I want to find out if it’s right.”

  “It won’t be,” the Chief Inspector said without hesitation, “your ideas so seldom are.”

  “All right, all right,” Professor Stubbs grumbled, “I’ll let ye insult me if ye want to. I have a hard life, doin’ things to help yer dunderheads out an’ what do I get in the way o’ thanks? Nothin’. Sweet Fanny Adams. But I’ll let that pass, for there’s no point in me losin’ me temper. I’m a man o’ the most equable temperament, as ye know,” the Bishop opened his eyes in frank astonishment, “an’ I’ll take almost anythin’ in the way o’ insult wi’out complaint. Ye should thank yer gods that I ain’t given to bein’ explosive. If I was, why by God, I’d gralloch ye, ye stew-eyed spalpeen. Now, havin’ said me little say, what I want to see is the memorandum book in which ye say that Julian Ambleside kept his accounts. Can I see that?”

  He glared fiercely and the Chief Inspector slid a green morocco note book across the table towards him.

  The Professor lowered himself into a chair. It was an old chair, which I think, Chief Inspector Bishop had resurrected from somewhere in the depths or heights of the Yard. It had been designed in the days when policemen were of more ample proportions than they are to-day. It just fitted Professor Stubbs with a slight squeeze. He opened the little book, and, settling his steel rimmed glasses more firmly on his nose, started to study it. On the back of an envelope he made several notes as he went through the pages slowly. Unfortunately his handwriting was too small for me to be able to see what he had written, but even if I had been able to read it, I doubt if it would have been very illuminating.

  It must have taken him nearly half an hour to read through the book. As he read he grunted and puffed away like an aged steam-engine. Finally, however, he closed the green covers and pushed the book to the Chief Inspector, who had been trying to fill in the time by dealing with the mass of papers on his desk.

  Professor Stubbs lay back in the chair, which creaked ominously beneath this attack. He took out his pipe and went through the ritual of scraping it and filling it. I noticed that the Chief Inspector did not much like the way in which the old man emptied the scrapings onto the rather worn carpet, but I think he has learned from painful experience that it is easier to let these things pass.

  He sighed again, and laid down his fountain-pen, well out of reach of the Professor’s curious fingers. The Professor had once picked up a fountain-pen on his desk and after he had toyed with it for about three minutes it was no longer of any value as a writing instrument.

  “Well, John,” he said, “and what did you find there? Anything of any interest to anyone except yourself.”

  “No,” grunted the old man, “it’s of no interest to any one but meself. All I found was who did the murder. But ye see,” he stopped the Chief Inspector who had opened the book and was poring over the pages, “you got to know a bit more than ye do. Ye got to do some real detectin’ before ye’ll see what that book means. Ye got to be clever, like me.”

  He beamed immodestly at the Chief Inspector. If he had been able to, I think he would have crowed like a barnyard rooster.

  “Dammit man,” the Chief Inspector leaned forward, “if you know who was the murderer, you’d better tell me. You realise that it is your duty as a citizen to give every help within your power to the police.”

  The laugh which the Professor gave was both vulgar and noisy. The room shook for a second after he finished.

  “Now then, Reggie,” he said admonishingly, “ye know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t hold out on ye, if there was anythin’ which could be used as proof. That’s where ye’re handicapped. I can get to work on me suspicions an’ I can do things ye can’t do in me efforts to find out whether I’m right in me suspicions. As soon as I know where I stand I’ll let ye know. In the meantime ye’d better leave me to me own devices an’ trust that I’ll do me best to get you in for the last act.”

  The Chief Inspector looked at him with grave doubt.

  “I hope, John,” he said solemnly, “that you are not proposing to take the law into your own hands? You know I have noticed that you have a slight tendency to do that—all, of course, in the interests of justice and what you would probably call a neatly finished case. But I hope you realise that because you are working on the side of the law you are not automatically outside its control. If you break the law, you know, I will have to deal with you, in spite of our friendship, like any other criminal.”

  This warning was so much water off the Professor’s duck’s back. He chuckled to himself.

  “Ye’re a good soul, Reggie,” he said, “but ye needn’t fear that I’ll do anythin’ which’ll bring me within yer jurisdiction. I keep on tellin’ ye that I’m clever, an’ the day that I start breakin’ the law in earnest, ye’ll find that I don’t leave anythin’ which ye’ll be able to get hold o’. All I’d like to ask ye is that, if I gi’ye a ring an’ ask for it, ye’ll put a couple o’ men at me disposal to catch the murderer.”

  “I’ll come myself,” said the Chief Inspector. He still did not look as though he was convinced that the Professor really had got anything which might lead to the solution of the case. As we left the room I looked back and realised that he had opened the green morocco book and was deep in the study of its contents.

  In the Ely Arms, at the corner of Iron Street, we found Mr. Carr. He was drinking a pint of bitter and was relating a story to an admiring crowd of fellow-drinkers.

  “And so,” he said gesturing largely, “here was I with a camel standing in the middle of Piccadilly at two o’clock in the morning. The thing was I didn’t know anything about camels and I didn’t know where the hell I was going to garage this one. It’s the hell of a way to Tooting, too, and that’s where I was living at that time. I thought of taking it home with me
. It would have amused the kids all right, but I was damned if I was going to walk all that way. I tried to get on the camel’s back—have any of you tried to mount an unwilling camel?—no, well it just can’t be done. The only thing to do was to get rid of the thing. Now a camel’s not the kind of thing you can leave in a left luggage office and forget. It bites and it’s got the devil of a big slobbery mouth to bite with. It was then I had my bright idea. I would let it loose in St. James’s Park and after that finders could be keepers. The camel may be the ship of the desert all right, I tell you, but it’s not so hot on a staircase. I still don’t know how I managed to get it down the Duke of York’s steps, but I did it somehow. Anyhow, as I was saying, the moral of that story is don’t play cards with the owner of a menagerie, particularly when you feel you’re bound to win.”

  He turned from the recitation of this particularly tall story to look with surprise at his pint glass, which was nearly empty. His eye fell on us.

  “Oh, hullo, hullo, hullo, Prof,” he said cheerfully, “How’s trade? Have a drink? Three pints of bitter, please Miss.”

  It was fortunate that both the Professor and I were going to drink bitter for there was no space between Mr. Carr’s offer of a drink and his ordering of it.

  There was something very festive about Mr. Carr’s appearance and it took me a minute or two to work out what it was; then I realised that he was wearing a bright batik by Len Lye as a muffler. I assumed and rightly that he had “borrowed” this from the Museum. It certainly looked very gay.

  “Are you still interested in inventions, Prof?” he asked anxiously and I gave a hearty mental groan, “For if you are I’ve just thought of a winner. Have you ever had to clean out a frying pan? Well, if you had you’d have known how difficult it is to get all the fat out. So I wondered, cleaning out a pan this morning, whether we couldn’t make cheap frying pans that you threw away after using. But it seemed to me that that would be kind of extravagant and expensive and it was then that it came to me. Why not have frying-pans with greased paper linings which could be thrown away after use? And that’s only the beginning of the great idea. You see the greased paper would be impregnated with cooking fat so that you wouldn’t need to bother to put any into the pan when you started to fry. You’d just have your cooking-fat and your paper-lining in one, so as to speak. Don’t you think that’s a hot one?”

  “Very,” said the old man, but I could see that he was disappointed that the idea was not mechanical. He is only interested in things that go by clockwork or upon some obscure mechanical principle. I remember watching him erecting a most elaborate Archimedean screw to carry the water up from the tank at the bottom of the garden to a quite unnecessary tap. By the time one had cranked away at the screw to get enough water to fill one pail, one could have filled five by dipping them in the tank. But because it was a mechanical device the old man had been convinced that it must be better.

  “Have you discovered your murderer?” said Mr. Carr and did not wait for an answer. “My old mother thinks that Mr. Ambleside just got tired of being alive—she says some people do get that way—and he throttled himself. She’s got one thing though. She says that someone hung him up there to make people think that I had done it. Just because I had wanted to put some steak on the walls of the ladies’ lavatory. Did you ever hear the like?”

  He laughed heartily at the very idea that anyone could have, for one moment, thought that he had placed the body of Julian Ambleside dangling in front of the painting by Max Ernst. The Professor said nothing. There was nothing that he could say. He ordered another round of drinks.

  Chapter 8

  The Blinding Light

  THE MUSEUM of Modern Art was not quite so crowded as it had been on the previous day. Going in we met Francis Varley who smiled to us politely.

  “You’re not thinking of taking on that job again to-day, are you, Boyle?” he asked me, “For if you are I think you’d better borrow a pair of iron-gloves. That child is here again. You know, don’t you, that she failed to get away with the fur-teapot again yesterday afternoon, but she dashed it on the ground and broke it. I think that even her father was a bit put out by this. To tell you the truth,” he was a bit confidential, “I don’t think that marriage is going to last much longer. I’ve seen it coming for some time. How’s your chief getting on with his detection? I hope he doesn’t pick on me as the culprit, for I assure you that I didn’t do it. All I did was to stir up some mud.”

  I could not tell whether he was joking or not. I went on into the gallery looking for the Professor. He seemed to be studying the large Max Ernst with great attention. A green amoebic figure was engaged in a deathly struggle with a paler embryonic one, before a background of mechanical cicadas which looked as though they were of doubtful ancestry, with an airplane somewhere in the family tree.

  He looked at this picture in silence for a few minutes and then he wandered slowly round the rest of the pictures. It seemed to me that he was wasting time. We spent about half an hour in the gallery and then the old man led the way towards the stairs. We climbed up until we reached the library.

  I had been quite right in my assumption that anything I had felt in the way of a hangover that morning would be nothing to what Douglas felt. The one thing that seemed certain was that he could not have felt as bad as he looked. If he had there would have been a bevy, or whatever the collective noun is, of undertakers round him.

  He greeted us without joy. I noticed that he was engaged on the job of writing a list of the contents on the front of each folder of photographs. The Professor felt in his pocket and produced the Museum envelope. He handed it over to Douglas.

  “Here’s your photograph back,” he said, “an’ you might as well have the one from Cooper’s too. Can you tell me, by the way, why there was no copy of that photo in the folder?”

  Douglas looked as though thinking hurt him badly, but he managed to produce the answer.

  “Oh,” he said, “the photograph is at the printer’s. You see I rooted out the photos of all the pictures which were in the Museum and sent them along to the printer, who passed them on to the block-maker. Every picture in the gallery is, as you know, reproduced in the catalogue, and we had the Chirico done too, before it was destroyed when Emily thought that it had better be taken out.” He creased his brow in thought before he went on. “But, now I come to think of it, I’ve had the photos back from the block-makers and that one wasn’t among them. I wonder why not.” Then his face cleared. “Oh well, I suppose that Emily or Dr. Bellamy knew that there was a print in the folder and so they didn’t bother to send it back to me. There was no point in cluttering the place up with duplicates.”

  “Uhhuh,” the old man grunted, “d’ye mind if I use yer phone.”

  He picked up the red receiver and, rather to my surprise, managed to get through to Scotland Yard without much trouble or profanity. “These two men,” he growled, “I want ’em. Standin’ at the front door o’ the place. Yes. That place. An’ if they see anyone tryin’ to leave in a hurry they’d better stop that person. No. If ye come in ye’ll probably spoil it.”

  He rang off and wiped his face with his brightly coloured handkerchief. Every time he manages to make a successful telephone call one would think that he had succeeded in climbing Everest.

  “What’s up?” said Douglas, “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Nothin’,” replied the Professor, “except stay where ye are and get on wi’ yer work. I’m just kinda goin’ to try an experiment.”

  He went out of the library and went slowly and heavily down the stairs. I knew that he was working out a plan of action in his mind as he went and I did not dare to speak. It would have been no good if I had spoken. All I would have got would have been growls and mutters. I followed him in silence.

  We arrived at the door of Emily’s office and he tapped heavily. Her voice told us to enter. Inside there were three people. Emily herself, Dr. Cornelius Bellamy and Francis Varley.

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p; The old man looked round in a pleased way. “D’ye mind if I take up some o’ yer space an’ time for a bit,” he said cheerfully, with the air of an Einstein approaching God with a request for a portion of the heavens.

  “Not the least, my dear sir.” It was Dr. Bellamy. “Do take a seat.”

  “Thanks,” said the old man, looking doubtfully at the steel and fabric chair which the Doctor indicated. I sat down and he apparently decided that what I would risk he would, too. He sat down and the steel bowed slightly beneath his weight.

  Dr. Cornelius Bellamy was correcting proofs. His pencil moved over the page all the time in spite of the interruption. Emily Wallenstein had apparently been speaking to Varley who was perched on the edge of her desk, swinging one leg and smoking a cigarette. They looked at us with a curiosity that was in sharp contrast to the Doctor’s off-hand business.

  The old man looked round the room again. He seemed to be in no hurry to start anything. He gazed with pleasure at the Calder mobile turning slowly as the warm air reached it. He looked at the pictures on the wall and then he looked once more at the people in the room.

  “Umph,” he snorted suddenly, “I suppose there’s no point in me keepin’ you waitin’. I just kinda came along to say I’d solved the problem o’ the murder o’ Julian Ambleside. I know who done it an’ I know why he done it.”

  Dr. Bellamy’s pencil continued to mark the proofs before him. Emily and Varley sat as if frozen. I noticed that Varley’s leg had stopped swinging.

  “Uhhuh,” the old man grunted, seemingly very pleased with himself. “I know the murderer’s name and I know why he did it. Trouble wi’ him was largely vanity. If he hadn’t bin so goddam vain he’d not ha’ needed to murder Ambleside.”