Case with 4 Clowns (27 page)

“Here, wait a minute,” said Beef. “Who's running this case, I'd like to know? You stick to your side of the business and I'll attend to mine.” Then turning again to the lion-trainer, he went on: “What makes you think you've been poisoned?”

“I feel sick,” said Kurt abruptly.

“Might have been something you had for supper,” said Beef. “Lots of people get like that. I mean, do you think there's anybody who might want to do you in?”

I felt somehow that Beef was being over-flippant with what might possibly, even probably, be a genuine case, but he seemed also to realize this, for his next question was far more serious.

“No,” he said, “all joking aside, can you tell me what you've been eating for the last twenty-four hours or so? I mean who cooks your meals and that?”

“I cook all my own food,” said Kurt.

“Haven't eaten nothing but what passes through your own hands?” queried the Sergeant.

“Nothing,” said Kurt decisively. Then: “No, wait a minute, that's a lie. I had a cup of tea yesterday afternoon that I didn't make myself. That's right, I forgot all about that.”

“And where did you get that from?” asked Beef.

“Mrs. Jackson.”

Beef suddenly became alert and brisk in his manner. “All right, Kurt,” he said, standing up and moving towards the door, “I'll have a doctor up to see you just as fast as I can. Don't you worry now. It's probably not very serious, but there's no sense in taking risks.”

When we were outside, and Beef had sent one of the hands off to fetch a doctor, I asked him if he really thought what he had told the lion-trainer.

“Well,” he said, “you know how it is. Best thing to do with these nervy people is to make them feel it's going to get better. Worry never did anybody any good.”

“Then you think it might be poisoning?” I asked.

“I don't waste my time thinking about things like that,” said Beef. “There's a doctor coming along soon, and then we shall
know.
That's what's important.”

“Then there's nothing for us to do but to wait?” I said.

“Well,” said the Sergeant, “there's one or two little jobs I'd like to get off. You might give me a call when the doctor arrives. I'm going back to the wagon.”

This seemed to me an obvious hint that I was not required, so I looked around for something to occupy myself with while Beef went back to our wagon. The big top always attracted me at this time of the day. The loneliness of its huge empty interior with the warm sun shining dully through the roof, the hot smell of crushed grass and canvas, the effect of being indoors and outdoors at the same time, all produced in me a peculiar sensation of a deep past knowledge of these things which now was forgotten. Perhaps it was the flower-shows I used to visit with my uncle at which the exhibits were seldom so exciting as the thick heavy atmosphere of the tent, somehow mixed up with the brassy music from the energetic local band playing outside, which had left in me some faint and almost untraceable remembrance rising again as a feeling of unease whenever I entered the deserted circus tent. There was, I felt, something uncanny and denaturalized in the presence of living grass in such a place, sprouting like a panache out of the center of the ring.

Instead of walking straight in through the normal front entrance of the tent, I lifted the side wall and slipped in under
it. I was behind the tier of seats, but as I glanced between the boards I saw Jackson enter the ring and walk across it. For some reason I did not move or attempt to attract his attention, but stood perfectly still and watched him. He seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts, and his eyes never raised themselves from the ground just in front of his feet. When he reached the edge of the ring he bent down and hauled at the wire support of Daroga's wire-walking apparatus, walking backwards and so pulling it roughly into the correct position across the side of the ring. Then he fastened the end he had been holding loosely to one of the quarter-poles and began to examine the tightening screw half-way up the wire.

I began to feel slightly embarrassed in case he should glance up and see me. I was not hidden by the planks of the seating, and should he happen to turn his eyes in my direction he was bound to notice me. But I dared not move. As far as I could see, there appeared to be nothing suspicious about his action so far, and yet I had a feeling that it would be better somehow not to be discovered spying on him.

After a few minutes, apparently satisfied with his scrutiny, he returned the apparatus to its normal position between acts, and quickly left the tent. I waited a little while until he should get clear, and then left by the way I had entered, and went to find Beef to tell him what I had just witnessed.

Beef, however, as usual, was unimpressed when I told him.

“That's right,” he said. “As ring-master he's supposed to inspect all the apparatus before it's used.”

“Perhaps so,” I said a little damped, “but not necessarily at this time of the day. There's another three or four hours to the afternoon performance, so why was he sneaking around in there just now?”

“Shouldn't think there's very much in that,” commented Beef. “Perhaps he wanted to save a bit of time, or perhaps it just struck him that something might be getting a bit worn
somewhere. You know how, when you think of a thing, it's best to go and do it straight away. Perhaps …”

“Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps,” I said, with exasperation. “It doesn't strike me that's a very good foundation on which to base one's investigation into a murder.”

Beef grinned at me. “No, it isn't much of a way of doing things, is it?” he said, and shrugged his shoulders. “But there you are.”

Beef in this sort of mood infuriated me, and I walked to the window in an attempt to conceal my feelings. A long black car was driving through the gate of the tober, and after stopping by one of the hands who was apparently giving information, it moved on toward Kurt's wagon.

“Here's the doctor, anyway,” I told Beef, with a sense of relief, and he immediately jumped to his feet.

“Nice car,” he commented, glancing out of the window. “Does well for himself. Come on, let's hear what he's got to say.”

Actually the doctor had very little to say. There was no doubt that Kurt was ill, but the doctor seemed to think that it was nothing more than a slight breakdown. Kurt had been overworking for some time. On no account, the doctor said, must Kurt get up or do anything energetic for three or four days.

“If you can,” he went on, “stay in bed for a week. But I know you people. You'll be up long before you should and working as usual. With a constitution like yours, of course, that's not very serious. But take my advice and rest as long as you can. If anything further develops, let me know straight away.”

To Beef and me privately he confessed that he could not tell for sure whether the breakdown might not have been brought on by some sort of poisoning. But he doubted anything so romantic, and seemed to think the Sergeant was
trying to pull his leg. He was a very prosaic little man and his imagination fitted his stature. Beef watched him walk fussily away, and then gave me a grin.

“I bet he was the sort of boy,” he said, “that never read Sexton Blake because it was too ‘far-fetched.' Just shows you, doesn't it?”

Beef did a great deal of writing and pondering in the wagon that night. He would sit in his chair staring blankly at the wall for long periods, and then suddenly grin at me. After one of these long periods of intense thought I could stand it no longer.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“What, just then?” he said. “Well, I was just wondering what would happen to my window-boxes. I told Mrs. Beef to give them a look over now and again to see they was doing all right. But I bet she forgets all about them. Wouldn't like anything to happen to them.”

“Great heavens!” I exclaimed, “I thought you were working on the case.”

“Oh, you don't want to get yourself worried over that,” said Beef comfortingly.

“Do you think you know everything now?” I asked eagerly.

Beef grinned boyishly. “I'm going to arrest Cora Frances tomorrow,” he said.

“Cora Frances!” I gasped, with amazement. “Do you mean that …” And then something in the Sergeant's eye made me realize that I was having my leg pulled. “Beef, you're impossible,” I said.

“That's what the missus says,” agreed Beef.

At last I could stand it no longer and left the wagon. The last sound I heard as I closed the door behind me was Beef's derisive chuckle. The evening show had nearly finished, so I waited about the grounds until the people had crowded out and the big top began to come down.

I saw Ginger and Tug Wilson talking together, and wandered slowly across to them. They did not notice my approach, and I heard a few scraps of their conversation before I reached them.

“And that Bogli's Circus,” Ginger was saying, “been trailing along after us for the last three or four days. Do you know they're going to be in the next village to us tomorrow?”

“Looking forward to another barney with them?” asked Tug.

“I reckon we've got enough on our hands without them,” replied Ginger. “This circus is no bed of roses.”

Tug leaned forward and put his hand on Ginger's sleeve. His face, turned sideways to me, was deeply shadowed and the hump on his back seemed to stand out more than usual against the canvas of the zoo behind them. “You want to remember one thing, though,” he said.

“What's that?” asked Ginger.

“The ghost walks tomorrow night,” answered Tug.

At this moment they both looked up and noticed me approaching and stopped their conversation immediately. We talked for a few minutes rather inconsequentially, and I left them as quickly as I could to return to the wagon.

“Here,” I said as I burst into the wagon, “I just heard something very queer.”

“Shut the door,” said Beef, who was undressing for bed. “I'm not a peep-show.”

I told him what I had heard pass between Tug Wilson and Ginger.

“The ghost walks, does it?” said Beef, struggling into his pajamas. “Well, I hope it keeps fine for it.”

“Now, Beef,” I began. But the Sergeant pulled the covers over his head and appeared to be paying no attention. “Good night,” came his muffled voice from under the blankets.

May
2nd
(continued).

As I commenced slowly to undress I thought briefly over the part I had so far played in this case. Surely I had done all that could be expected of an investigator's chronicler? I could think of no time when I had not lived up to my traditional role, nothing I had left undone which I ought to have done, or done that which I ought not to have done. At times had I not been the abject fool? I had asked all the right questions, showed excitement over every single piece of evidence, no doubt missing all that was really important; I had allowed Beef to snub every suggestion I had made, and yet shown no rancor or bitterness in reporting his suggestions. I had even, I thought mournfully, attempted to provide “interest” with what I was still not sure was not a real love-affair with Anita. Now, traditionally again, all that was left to me was to wait patiently for Beef to clarify the puzzle. The Sergeant appeared to have made up his mind.

But, I thought suddenly, if Beef had made up his mind, why should not I make up mine? There was nothing revolutionary in a chronicler having a theory. But why, for once, should not the chronicler's theory be correct? With this resolution I drew out paper and pen and ink, turned the lamp higher, and sat down at the table.

In the first place it seemed to me that if there was to be an attempt at murder in the circus, it must occur on the next day. Not only because Gypsy Margot had given a time limit in her prediction, and tomorrow was the last day of that period, but for other more immediate reasons. Tomorrow was the Jubilee performance. The circus had been running for twenty-five years, and this was, in a sense, a personal celebration of
the artists. But it was still a public show, and because of the unusual feeling in the show about the importance of the event, I realized that all the artists would be keyed up for the performance. It should have been the best show the circus had ever given, we had been told, but so also, it might be the most tragic. An intending murderer could scarcely choose a time when the circus folk's attention would be less acute, less likely to notice small irregularities. And this gave the murderer the biggest chance of getting away with it.

I proceeded to run through the circus people, trying to assess them, and take into consideration all that we had learned of them since we had been with the show. Somewhere among them, we had to suppose, was a murderer, and somewhere was a person on whose life there was going to be an attempt. Only tomorrow's show would tell us for sure which of them fitted into these roles.

I felt as I wrote that there was something unreal about considering people as possible murderers, but that was the only possible way of producing a case.

Jackson was obviously the man to begin with. That cold, cynical face was like a mask on the real man, a mask which looked at the circus he was running as if it were no more than some halfpenny peep-show. Did he really think all people were fools? Or was it some inadequacy in him which required cynicism and sarcasm as a defense against a world a little too big for him? In this particular case, I felt, it was the characters themselves which were the clues, and their actions, thoughts, behavior, which made up the evidence. It was as important to decide what sort of a man Jackson really was, as to discover why he had been so agitated about the button Beef discovered in his wagon.

The button seemed, in some way, to link him with the wire-walker. Of all the people in the circus there was only Daroga who was not afraid of the proprietor. Even Corinne, with her
defiance and ostentatious selfishness, was nervous with her father. She lost, as everybody else did in his presence, her self-complacent scorn for anything outside herself. Mrs. Jackson had shown her own feelings only too clearly on that day when Anita had been stabbed; she had scuttled back to the wagon to get her husband's supper not in the way some wives do—to keep peace in the house—but because of Jackson himself. Eric, perhaps, was harder to understand. He seemed to keep well out of his father's way as much as possible, but whether from fear or because he simply disliked trouble was difficult to decide. And yet Daroga, in every meeting between the two, had shown complete self-confidence. What was there between the two men which always gave Daroga the whip hand? When the circus had pitched into the wrong tober it had been Jackson who scurried off to change the booking with the landlord. When there had been trouble over a new elephant-man, it had been Daroga who triumphed, and the man still worked in the show, despite Jackson's obvious disapproval.