Come Away, Death

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought that,’ said Dick.

  ‘Ah, but then, you don’t know him as we do.’

  ‘I’ve worked with him, you know, for three years now. I – as a matter of fact, and not because he’s your father, or anything silly like that – I like him very much.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know much,’ said Megan. ‘He’s rather an old fraud, archaeologically, isn’t he?’

  ‘Well, not as much as you might think. It’s true he isn’t sound on some points, but he has the vision, the enthusiasm, and, of course, the imagination.’

  ‘I should think he had the imagination all right,’ said Megan, with a grin. They gained the house, and sat down in the little portico. Dish came out with a tray.

  ‘Good for you, Dish,’ said Megan. ‘Dish, are you looking forward to Ephesus next week?’

  ‘I am not proceeding to Ephesus, Miss Megan.’

  ‘Too bad. Why not?’

  ‘I was asked my opinion as to the necessity and advisability, miss, and my notion was it was my place better to stay here, where I might be able to do a bit of good.’

  ‘Don’t you like picnicking, Dish?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice, no, miss.’

  ‘Look here, Dish. Suppose I suggest you alter your mind, and come?’

  ‘Very good, miss. But it would be contrary to my notion of what’s for the best.’

  ‘You’re dashed mysterious. What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Mr Armstrong, miss. I was brought up violent, and the old Adam dies hard. I have been within a – what shall I say, miss? – of dotting Mr Armstrong a couple already, and he knows it, and eggs me on.’

  ‘Yes, he is annoying. Mr Dick thinks so, too, don’t you, Ronald dearie? But, Dish, I’m sure my father didn’t take kindly to your idea of leaving him in the lurch like this.’

  ‘I haven’t broken it yet to Sir Rudri, like, miss. I had it out with —’

  ‘Mother? And what did she say?’

  ‘Said she’d never liked him herself, miss.’

  ‘No, she never has. I respect mother’s judgement of young men. That’s why you’ll have to pass the censor, Ronald, before our engagement can be announced. Did you realize that, my lad?’

  Dish left them, and, almost as soon as he had gone, Gelert came in and sat down in the nearest chair.

  ‘Washed your shirt?’ asked his sister unsympathetically. ‘I hear Aunt Adela had the deuce of a job working the authorities to get them to turn a blind eye on your deed of violence. In England you’d have got about fifteen years for stabbing a man like that, you nasty, messy, weak-minded, puling, yes-man.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Gelert. He got up.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Megan.

  ‘To the museum, of course.’

  ‘I wonder you have the neck. Go with him, Ronald, and keep an eye on him. He can’t be trusted. He bites.’

  Having delivered herself of these sisterly comments on the ending of her brother’s seventh love-affair, she herself rose, and went out. Gelert gazed after her, then looked across at Dick.

  ‘Have you two fixed it up, then?’

  ‘Not quite, actually,’ said Dick. ‘May I really come with you to the museum?’

  ‘I suppose so, if you want to.’

  ‘Well, I wanted to go to the museum. I say, Gelert, have you, by any chance, seen any of Armstrong’s photographs?’

  ‘They’re not printed yet.’

  ‘Will he show them to you?’

  ‘Not the ones you mean.’

  ‘Gelert, is his game – blackmail?’

  ‘Oh yes, I expect so. Father’s asked for it, anyhow. By the way, I’m not going to Ephesus.’

  ‘Not going? Oh yes, you must.’

  ‘No, I needn’t. I can’t go anywhere else with Armstrong. That idiot I stabbed yesterday – I suppose you thought I was mad?’

  ‘No, I could quite understand. All these Greeks carry knives. I’ve seen them fighting in low restaurants.’

  ‘Didn’t know you haunted low restaurants.’

  ‘Well, one ought to see the life of the city, don’t you think?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought you felt like that. Well, anyway, when I went for that silly beast I was really going for Armstrong.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I have felt like that about people. I remember chopping a little tree down once, when I was eight or so. It was really an aunt of mine.’

  ‘Good Lord! George Washington in person!’

  “Yes, and no.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve told a good many lies, if that’s what you mean.’ He stood up. ‘Let’s go, then, shall we? You know,’ he added suddenly, ‘the trouble about Armstrong’s photographs, as I see it, is not that people will think the stunts were faked – as we, of course, know they were – but that they were real – that we actually did get the real Iacchus to come to us at Eleusis, and that Aesculapius really did send the serpents to heal the sick at Epidaurus.’

  ‘What about Mycenae? Nothing happened there. Father had given up faking. All he did there was to hide that bit of gold – the bit Dish found. I hope your stuff turns up. You think Armstrong’s got it, don’t you? So do I. In fact, he showed it me – I suppose it was your bit – and asked me whether it was genuine. Why don’t you stand up to the blighter and get it back?’

  Dick nodded, and then said:

  ‘Yes, but what about those boys and that beastly knife? And what about the cow? It struck me that there was something fearfully sinister, somewhere, about the poor old cow.’

  ‘Just Armstrong’s silly, filthy cruelty.’

  ‘Ah, but don’t you see, Gelert, that it couldn’t have been he who killed the cow?’

  ‘How do you make that out?’

  ‘I don’t know. It stands to reason.’ He looked helpless, and then added, ‘I just feel it. It doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t know anything about that sort of thing. The cow had been properly killed – ritually killed, I mean. And it couldn’t have been the people who went to Corinth. And Sir Rudri didn’t go.…’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘These are my friends and I’ll not judge them. For I have no mind to quarrel with either; one I think clever, and the other gives me joy.’

  1

  ‘BUT IF YOU’RE not coming to Ephesus, I don’t think I’ll go, either,’ Cathleen said. ‘But why can’t you come?’

  ‘Because I’ll wring Armstrong’s neck if I do come,’ Ian replied. Mrs Bradley, from her seat in the long, shady portico, clicked her tongue and observed:

  ‘I wonder whether all the rest of his acquaintances dislike the young man as much as we do?’

  ‘Oh, he’s very thick with Greeks,’ said Gelert, turning the leaves of a book in which he was not interested. ‘Dick and I, with Megan, went round the town a bit in the late afternoon, after tea, and I saw him in a café. He didn’t see us – at least, I don’t fancy he did – doesn’t matter, anyway – but he seemed to be the life and soul of the party which, I imagine, he was treating to drinks. By the way, look at what I bought.’

  He displayed it – a crudely coloured picture of the Acropolis by moonlight – a hideous distortion of the truth.

  ‘It’s a beauty,’ said Megan, with enthusiasm. She and Gelert collected such monstrosities. He tossed it over.

  ‘Here you are! It’s yours. I’ve got that delightful study of the Theseon, and the no less adorable set of morning, noon, and night on the royal palace.’

  ‘Oh, Gelert! You angel!’ said his sister, seizing the daub gladly and rushing away with it to add it to her collection.

  ‘I owe her something. She lent me twenty quid,’ said Gelert, in languid apology for his generosity; the picture, Mrs Bradley surmised, was even more horrible, and, in consequence, of more value to them, than the majority of those they had acquired. ‘Then when fatuous fatheads at home start raving about Greece, we’re going to dig out the whole lot, and rhapsodize over them,’ he added. ‘We collect objets d’art, too. I think Dick must have
been bitten with the mania. Give you three guesses what we saw – and he bought – to-day in the bazaar.’

  ‘An ostrich-egg left by the Turks.’

  ‘No. We’ve got one of those. I think I’ll give it him. Go on. Have another shot.’

  ‘Carved elephant-tusks?’

  ‘I say! Are you a thought-reader? But, of course, you are! That’s your profession, isn’t it? Anyhow, you’re so close that I think I’ll give it you. A pair of ibex horns.’

  ‘But how Homeric,’ said Mrs Bradley, delighted.

  ‘By J – Zeus! So it is! I never thought of that! You know, the expedition must have occasioned acute suffering to Dick. He’s really keen; and I expect he thinks the whole thing has been a burlesque. I shouldn’t be surprised if he turned down the Ephesus journey.’

  ‘I should,’ said Megan, who had returned.

  ‘Oh? Don’t tell me he has —’

  ‘Yes, I do tell you. He has.’

  ‘And – er – if it’s not in bad taste to ask – just to allay a brother’s natural anxiety about your future —’

  ‘You weren’t so chirpy the day you stabbed the tobacconist’s son-in-law in the gizzard, you meat-fed lamb!’ said Megan, with some austerity. ‘But, to set your mind at rest, and so that you can get over all the hooting before you see Ronald – and don’t you dare to laugh about it and upset him, because he’s easily upset and I won’t have it – yes, I am, and we jolly well are!’

  She looked defiant. Gelert rose and planted an untidy kiss on her left cheek. Megan turned and hugged him.

  ‘I’ll give you your twenty quid back for a wedding present,’ he said, seizing her arms and taking them forcibly from his neck. He shoved her into a chair. He was stronger than he looked, Mrs Bradley was interested to notice. It was a phenomenon she had observed before in slight and languid young men. ‘But I thought you’d fallen for Armstrong’s pagan charms,’ he added, grinning broadly.

  Cathleen turned to Ian.

  ‘An evening walk, Ian, around the city?’

  ‘Not for me,’ said Ian. They both got up and went out.

  ‘I suppose we might as well all go to bed,’ said Gelert, correctly foreseeing the goal of the married lovers. ‘It isn’t hot now.’

  ‘We ought to wait up for Ronald, I suppose,’ said Megan, slowly.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Alexander Currie, now happily recovered from the mosquitoes. He came in and seated himself. ‘I will wait up for Ronald Dick. Where are the laddies?’

  ‘They’ve been in bed ages, I should hope.’

  ‘I doubt whether they have,’ said Marie Hopkinson, coming in with Sir Rudri. ‘Let’s all go and see.’ So, leaving Gelert, after all, to wait up for Ronald Dick, they all trooped in to say good night to the little boys, who were all in Ivor’s room rehearsing the modern Greek vulgarisms which they had spent the past two days in acquiring. The night closed in on pleasant domesticity.

  Dick came in at twelve. He had been to the play, but had come out before the end.

  ‘What was it?’ Gelert inquired. ‘The usual Romeo and Juliet?’

  ‘No,’ Dick answered, winding a strip of ox-hide, about fifty inches of it, round his hand, and smiling at the recollection, ‘it was Lady Windermere’s Fan. I would have stayed to the end, but the man next me was sick, and it rather put me off, so I came away. Besides, I didn’t really want him to know that I had spotted him.’

  ‘Who was it, then?’

  ‘The excellent Dish.’

  ‘Dish? Sick?’

  ‘Horribly.’

  ‘I bet he would be, if he was sick at all. He’s a very thorough fellow.’

  ‘It was most unpleasant,’ said Dick. ‘He came in halfway through, making rather a disturbance and talking, I think, in Hindustani.’

  ‘Pidgin-English, more likely,’ said Gelert. ‘His ship was in Chinese waters at one time, I believe. The China Station, don’t they call it, or something?’

  ‘Well, I wish they’d taught him out there how to hold his drinks.’

  ‘Oh Lor! Has he reached home yet? Mother will have a fit. She thinks Dish quite incorruptible.’

  ‘Well, so he is, I expect, under ordinary circumstances. I expect he’s just celebrating the tour. Is he coming to Ephesus, do you know?’

  ‘Are you coming to Ephesus, then?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I thought you were doubtful about it this morning. I am. Frightfully doubtful. I’m tired of the crack-brained affair.’

  ‘Oh, this morning? Yes, that was a long time ago.’

  ‘By the way,’ said Gelert, getting up and patting Dick on the shoulder, ‘awfully glad about you and Megan, and so forth.’

  ‘Megan and I?’ said Dick. ‘But nothing is settled, you know. By the way, I asked Armstrong again for the Mycenaean gold.’

  ‘What happened?’

  He aimed a kick at me, and swore. I dodged the kick, and called him a blasted jackdaw, and threatened him with the police. He only laughed. He said if I went to the police I should never marry Megan. He would take care of that.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘Small beer, all of it.’

  DISH HAD LEFT the house at six because it was his evening out. He went, as usual, to Phaleron, with his telescope, to look at the ships in the bay. There was nothing very interesting to see. Ever since they had been in Athens he had looked for warships, but, except on one occasion, he had not seen any that enthralled him. However, he still made the port his first objective, and spent about an hour focusing the ships in the harbour. To the smell of the sewage he was utterly impervious, and, if asked, would probably have admitted that he thought it was the ozone.

  His next proceeding – also a matter of habit – was to charter a small boat and have himself rowed towards Salamis and back by a couple of sweating Greeks. After this his programme varied. Sometimes he would go to the pictures, and would sit, silent and non-critical, while an English film of, possibly, the year 1920, with German captions, would be shown. Then he would come out, buy himself a drink and a packet of Greek cigarettes, and listen to a loudspeaker rendering dance music. Then he would buy himself a beer at one more café, and so home.

  On this particular evening, however, after the boat-trip, he went to the café first, and there saw Armstrong in the company of two young women. He ordered his drink, and asked for his cigarettes, and then Armstrong saw him. He lounged over to him and said:

  ‘Oh, Dish, just trot back to the house and fetch me my small camera, the one I use for snaps. My friends here want me to take their photographs.’

  Dish stared solemnly into his glass and took no notice.

  ‘Cut off, Dish,’ said Armstrong. ‘Don’t sit there like an owl.’

  Dish said:

  ‘It’s my afternoon off. I don’t go back to the house for nobody, without it might be my employer, and then as a favour.’

  With that, he picked up his glass. The girls giggled, and Armstrong, flushing angrily, said suddenly:

  ‘I shall be your employer soon, you obstinate old fool, and you’ll soon find yourself without an employer after that!’

  Then he shoved the glass which Dish had raised to his mouth, and splashed the drink in all directions, mostly over Dish.

  The ex-A.B. put down the half-empty glass and wiped his face. Then he spat on his hands. Then he hit Armstrong in the belly. When Armstrong got up – and it took him some time to do that – he hit him on the nose and among the teeth. Then he slogged him in the ribs. Then, with his great, horned palm, he struck him across the face. To conclude he put his hand across Armstrong’s nostrils and literally pushed him over. Then he sat down and began to drink again, waiting for Armstrong to get up. The girls, who had giggled at first, and then grown frightened, hustled their escort out of the café along the crowded street. Dish sat still, his eyes glinting as they had not glinted for years. He became aware that he had a thirst on him that seemed to call for more beer.

  At last, when he had drunk rather more t
han he needed, he patronized the theatre at which Dick was watching Lady Windermere’s Fan, was sick, and, later, went on to another café to replace the beer that he had lost. At half-past one that morning he was informing a group of total strangers that she was the honey-honey-suckle, and that he was the bee. He returned to the house an hour later, apparently sober. Dick was waiting up, and let him in.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘Boy, boy!’

  ‘WHAT I STILL want to know,’ said Stewart, playing jazz rhythms on the woodwork of the portico, ‘is what that white figure was.’

  ‘What white figure, child?’ Mrs Bradley inquired, without interest. She was counting the rows on a sea-green jumper she was knitting, and did not want to lose the mathematical sequence of the pattern.

  ‘The white figure – horribly mysterious – I keep on thinking about it, and wishing we’d had the – wishing we’d thought of investigating it.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ She had finished her count and had made a little prick with her knitting-needle on the book from which she was following the directions. Perceiving that the little boy desired to hold a serious conversation with her, she laid down her work, folded her yellow hands, fixed her black eyes upon his face, and nodded.

  ‘That’s better. Thank you,’ said Stewart. His face was now such a mass of freckles that they had merged, giving him the effect of being both tanned and dirty. He was dressed in a bathing-costume and a pair of cotton trousers, from which his feet hung down and looked, even in sandals, small. His face, as usual, was grave; his green eyes lighted it. He was, Mrs Bradley decided, of all the very nice small boys she knew, the most solemn and the most attractive. ‘Don’t you know about the white figure?’ he demanded.

  ‘What white figure, child?’

  ‘At Epidaurus. We saw it twice. Both nights.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In that little maze-thing.’

  ‘The foundations of the Tholos? At what time?’

  ‘I don’t know very exactly. It was absolutely in the night. We went exploring. Well,’ he amended, ‘we were going to see if we could bag the snakes – for a rag, you know. And that was how it was.’