Swing Low, Swing Death

by R. T. Campbell

Automatically Varley’s long well manicured fingers pulled out a cigarette case. He extracted a cigarette and placed it between his lips and lit it without seeming to realise what he was doing. Emily picked up a slim pencil and fiddled with it nervously.

  “Ye see,” the Professor was amiable, “if the murderer had bin able to admit that he’d made a mistake, everythin’ would ah’ bin all right. He’d ha’ bin able to get away wi’ the rest o’ it.”

  “Who are you speaking about, Professor Stubbs?” Emily’s voice was very brittle as she spoke. Varley was still smoking automatically. I thought I knew what was coming.

  “Why,” said the old man in a surprised voice, “who is there amongst the people in this Museum who is quite incapable of making a mistake? Who is always right, no matter who else is wrong? Why the answer stands out a mile. Dr. Bellamy, of course.”

  Dr. Cornelius Bellamy, whose pencil had not hesitated in its course across the pages of proofs, looked up.

  “If that is a joke,” he said coldly, “I may say that I consider it is in the worst of taste and I demand an immediate apology. If on the other hand you are serious I must say that you are a bigger fool than I took you for. You have just made a statement which is designed to damage me, and you have made it in the presence of witnesses. I will ring up my lawyer as soon as it is convenient to me and I will take legal advice, sir, upon my position with regard to your slander.”

  “No,” said Professor Stubbs shaking his head slowly, “I’m not jokin’ an’ you know I’m not, Doctor. You know that you murdered Ambleside because he had become worried about the forged Chiricos which you sold him. If ye’d bin a bigger man ye’d ha’ gone to him an’ ha’ admitted that ye’d bin taken in by the pictures an’ ha’ offered to repay him as the opportunity arose. But ye weren’t. Ye couldn’t admit that ye’d bin wrong. If ye’d once admitted it yer whole world wi’ the figure o’ Dr. Cornelius Bellamy sittin’ on a pinnacle would ha’ crashed around ye. Ye had to kill him.”

  Dr. Bellamy looked round at us. He frowned and rose slowly to his feet.

  “I don’t know about you, my dear Emily, or you, Francis,” he said, “but I really am too busy to stay and waste time listening to the ravings of this lunatic. I will go and continue my work elsewhere.”

  He picked up the proofs and moved towards the door. I was about to get up to stop him, but the Professor clamped a heavy hand on my knee and whispered fiercely. “Let him go, son, he won’t get far.”

  The door closed firmly behind the Doctor. I could hear his firm unhurried steps going along the corridor. The Professor roused himself.

  “Can I use yer internal phone?” he demanded of Emily and she passed it over to him. He pressed the button labelled HALL and spoke to one of the Commissionaires. He told him to tell the men at the door to stop Dr. Bellamy. I heard the voice of the Commissionaire answering.

  “Very good, sir,” it said, “but there’s no signs of the Doctor, yet.”

  I noticed that Francis Varley’s leg was again swinging negligently and that he seemed to have become aware of the fact that he was smoking a cigarette.

  “You know,” he addressed the old man frankly, “you gave me the hell of a fright then. I thought you were going to accuse me, and I was trying to think of how I could clear myself.”

  “Ha,” the old man was pleased with himself, “I was cunnin’, wasn’t I? But ye see, I knew that ye hadn’t done the murder. Ye told me so yerself. Yes, ye did.”

  This was because Francis Varley had suddenly interjected a “No.”

  “Oh yes, ye did, son. Ye told me that ye thought the pictures by Chirico were out an’ out forgeries an that ye’d tried to save people’s feelings by sayin’ that they were copies done by the artist himself at a later date. Well, ye see that the Doctor’d never ha’ done that. He had no feelin’ about other people. He was always right an’ so he had to be the murderer.”

  “That’s all very well,” I said suddenly. Emily was still twiddling the pencil between her fingers and looking bewildered. “That’s all very well, but where has the Doctor gone to?”

  The old man shrugged his shoulders. “Oh,” he said airily, “he’s somewhere around an’ we’ll find him when we want him. He’ll turn up. I guess he’s thinkin’ over his sins an’ tryin’ to make up his mind that he’ll ha’ to confess.”

  Emily shook herself. “Professor,” she said briskly, “I must thank you for your work, but I must also say that I am very sorry that you ever came into the case. What am I to do without the services of Dr. Bellamy? The Museum will not seem the same place.”

  The Professor smiled. I think that like myself he was amused by the way in which Emily Wallenstein’s first thoughts had been of her beloved Museum of Modern Art.

  “Oh,” he boomed cheerfully, “you got a first-class feller here,” he pointed to Varley who looked surprised at this unsolicited testimonial, “who’s not the last bit afraid o’ people discoverin’ that he can be wrong sometimes. He’s got his vanity too, but it’s not so goddam awful overpowerin’ as the vanity o’ Cornelius Bellamy. An’,” he appeared to think of it suddenly, “young Douglas in the library’s a pretty good fellow. He don’t like regular hours, but give him an assistant an’ ye’ll find he’ll do all ye could ask o’ him. He’ll get drunk when he feels like it, an’ no doubt he’ll disappear occasionally, but ye’ll find that in between his bursts the work gets done somehow.”

  This eulogy of Douglas was interrupted. The door of the room opened and the bland face of Chief Inspector Bishop looked in. “What the something or other hell—I beg your pardon, ma’am—what the blazes are you up to, John?” it enquired bitterly. “Here we are standing in the hall, waiting for Dr. Bellamy to come along to be grabbed, though God alone knows why, and nothing happens. Where is Dr. Bellamy?”

  The Professor was not perturbed. “Oh,” he sounded rather off-hand, “I expect you’ll find him somewhere about. Ye’ll find that he’s yer murderer all right. It was his vanity that was his trouble.”

  “I’ll discuss that with you later,” said the Chief Inspector, cutting across the Professor’s words. It was obvious that the old man was itching to start a discussion on the subject of his cleverness. “What I want to know is, where is Dr. Cornelius Bellamy at the moment?”

  The Professor hoisted himself out of the chair. “Um,” he said, the gloom in his face clear, “Um. If ye won’t stop to listen to me story, first, I suppose I’d better help ye find the Doctor. He’ll be around. He’s probably in one o’ the lavatories.”

  We looked in all the lavatories, including the ladies’, where the decoration by Mr. Ben Carr with sweets which were already melting in streaks down the wall seemed to fascinate the Professor and infuriate the already irritated Bishop, but there was no sign of the Doctor anywhere. I felt that I was acting rather as a member of the crew in the Hunting of the Snark. There was no sign of Dr. Cornelius Bellamy anywhere in the building.

  We stood in the library and glared at Douglas. Our last hope had been that he had taken refuge there. We wanted to find him, but he seemed to have vanished completely. Even the old man looked a trifle bewildered.

  “Of course,” said Douglas with the air of one who was making a rather trite suggestion, “there’s always the chance that the Doctor is on the roof. Now I come to think of it I believe I did hear the noise of the lift going up there.”

  We piled out into the corridor and the Chief Inspector pressed the phosphor bronze button that should have brought it whining towards us. Nothing happened.

  “Where are the stairs?” the Bishop demanded of Douglas, who stood sunk in thought and hangover.

  “Oh,” Douglas was willing to be helpful, “you’d better come back into the library. I’ll shew you there.”

  He led the way back into the library and fiddled with a catch at the end of one of the bookcases. He withdrew a long slender steel rod with a hook at the end of it. He fixed the hook into a tiny notch in the ceiling of the library and gave a pull.

>   The ceiling opened up and a staircase, rather like the companionway of a ship, slid down towards us. The Professor planted his bulk firmly in the entrance.

  “I’m goin’ up,” he announced, “anyone comin’?”

  He was pushed forward by the efforts of those who wanted to get on to the staircase. There was a low loft-like place above the library, and the pulling down of the staircase had apparently lit a light in this. Above our heads there dangled a rope. The old man caught hold of this and pulled heartily. Another staircase, shorter than the first slid down before us, so easily that the Professor nearly fell over backwards with the excess of energy he had expended.

  When I arrived in the pale lemon sunlight of an autumn day, the old man was looking across at the far end of the room. There, on a low parapet, sat Dr. Cornelius Bellamy. Spread on his knees were the last few pages of proofs.

  He looked up as he heard us arriving. He did not seem to be either disturbed or pleased.

  “I have got one more page to do,” he announced smoothly, “and I may say that if anyone advances towards me I will throw myself over the edge.”

  He looked down at his page and the pencil travelled with regularity along the lines and then back. It seemed to me a period of hours before he reached the bottom of the page. From where I was standing I noticed that the proof was initialed, “O.K. for Press. C.B.” The hand that made these initials was as steady as if the Doctor had been sitting in Miss Wallenstein’s office, instead of perched on a narrow parapet so high above the hard street.

  He laid the proofs carefully on the ground and placed his pencil carefully on top of them to act as a paper-weight, so that the slight breeze would not scatter them.

  “My dear Douglas,” he said smoothly, “I wonder whether you would be good enough to see that these proofs are returned to my publishers?”

  “Certainly,” said Douglas in an automatic voice, “I’ll send them off myself, this evening.”

  “Thank you, my dear boy, that’ll be very kind of you.” The Doctor’s reply was unhurried.

  Chief Inspector Bishop beside me was growing impatient. He stepped forward, looking a trifle self-important.

  “Doctor Cornelius Bellamy,” he sounded rather pompous, “I am an officer of the law. I arrest you on a charge of having murdered Julian Ambleside. It is my duty to warn you that anything which you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence at your trial.”

  “At my trial?” said Dr. Bellamy, “At my trial? I thank you, my friend, but I do not desire to stand trial.”

  I was pretty quick off the mark, beating the Chief Inspector by a clear two feet, but I missed the Doctor by further than that. He just stepped up on to the low parapet. He looked back at us, and without a glance below him, stepped over the edge.

  How he missed the crowds on the pavement I do not know, but he hit no one. We went across to the lift which had previously refused to work because the Doctor had left the door open, and all crowded into it, even the Professor.

  The crowd, hushed as if in a cathedral, was gathered round all that was left of Dr. Cornelius Bellamy. It was not a pretty sight. Among the faces of the crowd I noticed that of Mr. Carr. He edged towards us.

  “Hullo, Prof,” he said sombrely, “so you found him out, did you?”

  “Yes,” said the Professor mildly amazed. “Why? Did you know he had killed Julian Ambleside?”

  “Lord bless you, yes,” said Mr. Carr, “of course I knew. I saw him trying to hang the body up. A poor job he made of it too. He was all thumbs and the body slipped around a good deal. I expect he was nervous. Why didn’t I tell you, eh? Well, I didn’t know all the ins and outs of the story and I never did like the law,” he glared at the Chief Inspector, “the police are always complaining about something. I told you, tho’, Prof, because I knew that if it wasn’t a matter for the letter of the law you’d be likely to let it ride. If Ambleside, say, had been doing a bit of blackmail on the Doc, why, I’d have said he deserved what was coming to him.”

  “No,” said the Professor heavily, “it wasn’t that at all. The trouble with Dr. Cornelius Bellamy was his godawful vanity.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Carr nodding his head, “he was sure of himself, wasn’t he. He was the great panjandrum himself and he made damn certain that there was no gunpowder running out of the heels of his boots. No, not him.”

  The ambulance arrived and cleaned up the mess. We went slowly back into the building. I met Douglas coming down the stairs. He had gone back quicker than the rest of us. I had assumed that he had wanted to be sick. The sight of the Doctor on top of a hangover like Douglas had would have been enough to make anyone sick. However, I realised that he had not been being sick. I made a wild guess and hit the bull’s eye.

  “Have you given Alec a ring?” I asked, “and told him the rest of the story?”

  Douglas nodded rather guiltily. “How did you know?” he asked. I just looked wise. After all the Professor steals all the thunder so I thought I might as well have a little summer lightning to myself.

  We gathered in Emily Wallenstein’s office. I could see that the Chief Inspector, who sometimes seems to make a profession of being angry, was very angry at the moment. His eyelids drooped so low on his cheeks that if they had drooped any lower he would have been sound asleep.

  “Why, John,” he asked in a listless and weary voice, “did you have to do that? Why couldn’t you have given me the information you had and have let me deal with the matter? Why did you have to let him kill himself?”

  “I’ll tell’ee all about it,” said the Professor fishing in his pockets, “once I’ve got me pipe goin’.”

  Chapter 9

  Conquest of the Philosopher

  “AS I’VE already said,” said the old man, repeating it, “the trouble with the late Dr. Bellamy was his vanity. He was a crammed full of vanity as an egg is o’ meat. Everyone else in the blinkin’ world might be wrong, but he was bound to be right. His trouble was that he’d bin right too often. One or two good hard failures might ha’ done him some good an’ let him think o’ himself as a man. As it was he kinda persuaded himself that he was a god an’ that men were inferior kinds of bein’s to people like himself. I don’t know where he got the forged pictures from, an’ I doubt if I ever will know, but I think that he probably bought ’em as copies quite cheaply an’ then, despisin’ those about him, started to make money by the sale o’ ’em. You remember, Reggie, don’t you, that I wanted some help from ballistics department an’ that you twitted me about it somethin’ horrid, eh?”

  The Chief Inspector nodded sleepily. I could tell that he was still in a furious temper.

  “Well, what d’ye think I’d want in a ballistics department? There is one instrument that I knew they’d have an’ that was a comparison microscope. I had got a photograph of the picture that Miss Wallenstein bought from Julian Ambleside an’ I also had an old photo from Paris, which I assumed would be the original. So I shoved the two of ’em under a comparison microscope and, by jiminy, they were different pictures. It was as simple as that. If the photograph from Paris was of the genuine paintin’ then the one that Cooper’s photographed was not genuine, tho’ it was a dam’ close an’ careful copy.”

  He looked up. I leaned forward and asked Emily Wallenstein if she had a drink. She produced a bottle of sherry and the necessary number of glasses. I think she found that being asked to do something was a bit of a relief. The old man took the sherry gratefully. He sipped at it and the contents of the glass disappeared as if they had been subjected to a blast from an oxygen-acetylene burner. I guess it was the dehydration which he’s always complaining about.

  “Ho, hum,” he went on, sucking in the last drips, “well, supposin’ that someone was forgin’ pictures an’ passin’ them off as genuine on to Julian Ambleside and Ambleside suddenly started gettin’ worried about them, what was he goin’ to do about it. Now if it had bin any o’ us here an’ we’d bin in the position o’ expert, like Bellamy, we’d h
a’ gone along to Ambleside an’ agreed that there were perhaps doubts about the pictures, but all the time we’d ha’ praised them up, an’ finally we ha’ said somethin’ to this effect. ‘O course, old feller, I may ha’ bin taken in, for I can’t claim to be infallible any more than the next man, but all the same they’re damn fine pictures. Tell you what, I’ll buy them back from you for what you gave me, but you’ll need to let me have six months to pick up the money again, for you realise I bin had just the same as you, an’ I spent some money I couldn’t afford on these pictures. All the same I think they’re good.’ The chances are that approached in this manner Ambleside would ha’ gone on bein’ willin’ to take the risk o’ the pictures not bein’ genuine an’ ye’d ha’ bin sittin’ pretty. But not so Dr. Bellamy. He had to be right an’ so he had not only to kill Ambleside but to destroy the blinkin’ pictures. So he did it, an’ I tracked him down.”

  He caught the dark slots of the Chief Inspector’s eyes fixed on him.

  “How was I to know,” he complained, “that this blighter here,” he shook his thumb towards Mr. Carr, “knew all about it. I was just goin’ on what I could discover an’ it looked to me as though I’d got no chance o’ provin’ anythin’ on the Doctor unless I could sting it out a him. How was I to know there was a roof to this place an’ that he’d go an’ sit on it?”

  He looked as injured as if someone had just kicked him in the middle of the stomach. Even the Chief Inspector had to grin.

  “All right, John, all right,” he said passively, “I’ll let you get away with it, but I’d just like to know what made you suspect that Dr. Bellamy was the culprit in the first place?”

  “I didn’t like him,” said the Professor magnificently and simply. He realised that he had given the Chief Inspector a rod with which to beat him, so he hurried on, “I didn’t like him an’ he made a shockin’ howler the first time we spoke to him. He referred to Julian Ambleside havin’ bin strangled by hand—well how was he to know that?”