Case with 4 Clowns (38 page)

“Well, there you have the chap, and what made me suspicious of him, and the first real clue I had. As soon as I saw him digging I puzzled my old brain. He wasn't burying one of the animals because none of them hadn't died—I found that
out. He certainly wasn't burying rubbish because of all the crowd that left their refuse lying about the fields we stood in, Ansell was the worst. He never troubled to put anything away. Then what was he burying? That's what I had to find out, and that's what I have found out.

“There are three people in this story,” said Beef. “Ansell, Kurt, and Corinne Jackson. And I'm not sure Corinne wasn't the worst. I never liked a woman without a heart, as you might say. She didn't care two straws for any of them. She didn't care which it was, Kurt or Ansell or that young fool Torrant, so long as they got her away from the show. She had no one else to turn to, no money of her own, and very little chance of getting a job without her father getting it for her. So all she wanted was a man who'd marry her and take her away. There was three of them willing. But only one had the money.”

“Torrant,” I suggested.

“Torrant! He couldn't have bought her an engagament ring. No, Kurt had the money.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“You shall see,” said Beef. “But how I came to suspect it was like this. Didn't you notice anything queer about the way he guarded his wagon? Never left it unlocked for a moment. It was the only one we couldn't get into. Don't you remember that morning when he as good as turned us away? Besides, he was the sort who would have money. Never spent any to speak of. Do you know he was the only man in the whole show who never asked me to have a drink?”

Beef might have been accusing Kurt himself of the murder, so solemnly did he bring out this preposterous accusation. “So there you have it. A man with money, tight and careful, going in with the lions every night; a young fellow who visits the show, decent and respectable; and another who's been brought up as a gentleman, who's been rag-tagging around
the world, in and out of prison, and who's stuck this job. And all three of them in love with one girl. And each of them been promised that as soon as he takes her away from the circus, she's his.

“What's the result? Well, I should have thought even you might have guessed it. The ‘gentleman' says to himself, ‘If I could find a way of getting rid of Kurt without arousing suspicion
and
getting my fingers on his money, I'm as good as home.' So he sets about thinking of a way, and being the clever underhand young brute he was, he gets hold of a way which would have fooled anyone in the world except the man what ought to be recognized as the greatest investigator of all time, and who sits before you now, thirsty, but unashamed.”

Beef gave a long, satisfied gasp. “I'll tell you how he decided to do it. He decided to kill Kurt with his own lions. Who could say anything then? He wasn't in the cage. He had hundreds of witnesses to prove that he hadn't egged them on. He didn't frighten the lions, and he didn't do anything to their apparatus which could have been found out afterwards even if there hadn't been an immediate investigation.”

“Then what did he do?” I asked.

“He dug,” said Beef.

“What do you mean, he dug?”

“I told you. He was burying the corpse of a horse. Only, of course, you jumped to conclusions and thought it was one of the circus horses. It was an old, old horse he was burying what had come from the knackers' yards days before. When we walked across that morning he was burying the horse meat what he should have been giving to the lions.”

“Good God!” I exclaimed, beginning at last to see light through the tortuous ways of Beef's explanation.

Once again Beef held up his hand. “That's nothing,” he said. “That was only part of the way I found out what he was up to. It's very doubtful whether you could get a lion to
turn on its trainer simply by making it hungry. But it would help. Ansell never meant to take any chances. That was part of his plan, and the part I got on to quickest.

“Did you notice something interesting Kurt told us one morning about wounds on a lion? He said that if you was to wound a lion it wouldn't bleed or even show the wound, because of the skin being loose, as it were. Well, that's another thing Ansell knew, and another part of his plan, as you will see in a minute. But the real trick lay in something you wasn't even interested in, though I pointed it out at the time. There was a fourth lion, just the same size and color as the third. I thought to myself when I saw it that I shouldn't have been able to tell them apart. Like as two peas, they was, or like as Helen and Anita. What Mr. Ansell decided to do was to send the fourth lion out into the cage when Kurt was in there ready to start the performance. And that's exactly what he did.”

I was leaning forward genuinely impressed.

“You see the beauty of the plan? There was no one in the circus who'd know it was the strange lion. And Ansell had shifted them round that very morning so that when the men moved the tunnel up it was just as usual. Then Ansell knew that whatever scrapping went on between the lions, there wouldn't be any scar showing until long after the thing had been dismissed as an accident and a verdict of accidental death given at the inquest. Then, after that, what was a scar on a spare lion? Even if anyone did notice it? The lions would all be short-tempered and hungry, and with the strange one among them the chances were that all three would go for Kurt. It's a wonder, really, that they didn't, and it speaks well for Kurt as a lion-trainer. But after all, one's enough, and it wouldn't take no Sir Bernard Spilsbury to see that Kurt's death was quick and sudden as soon as ever that lion, which had never been trained, which had never had a man in with
him, which was known to be a ferocious and uncontrollable brute, popped out of the tunnel and on to him in a flash.

“Mind you,” added Beef, “he nearly had a slip up. Kurt's illness was as genuine as the day is long. But who was to think he'd go and get up for the performance with a temperature like that? I thought I was as safe as houses to leave him there, even knowing all I did. I went back to half a dozen of the last tobers to check up on the buried horse meat and I managed that very nice. But I never dreamed that Kurt would go and put his head in the lion's mouth, as you might appropriately say.

“Of course,” Beef continued, “we've a bit more evidence to collect yet. We've examined the fourth lion and found just a suspicion of a scratch on his head. But the three lions had quite a good scrap in the tunnel, so I've no doubt the weals will come up nicely before the adjourned inquest, and it'll be those weals that'll hang Mr. Ansell. And besides that, what do you think he done?
Just
as I foresaw. After you'd gone off to bed last night, you couldn't understand my creeping about, could you? Old Beef wasting his time again, you thought. Ah, but was I? I got hold of young Ginger, who I thought would be as reliable a witness as any, and we watched Kurt's wagon. Would you believe it? As sure as fate across comes Ansell and in he goes, even with the body lying there mangled and horrible. He must be a cold-blooded brute, that Ansell. And he must have known where the money was too, because he was out in five minutes with the packet in his hand. We found it under his mattress today. Oh yes, we've got enough on him. Or shall have before the trial comes up.”

“And Corinne?” I asked. “Was Corinne in it?”

“Not, as you might say,
in
it,” returned Beef. “She never thought there'd be a murder. But any girl who runs about with three men at the same time is playing with fire, in my opinion.”

“What about Gypsy Margot?” I asked as cynically as I could. “How do you account for her extraordinary prescience?”

“I don't know what that means,” said Beef, “but what I think about her is this. There's no doubt that she was brainy and clever and that. You could tell that from the way she talked. 'Course, she picked up a lot of that from books, but I should call her the smartest old baggage in the show. All right. But it's pretty clear she doesn't like the circus, and especially she doesn't like the proprietor. We know why—because he took the circus off her brother's hands years ago and she'd never forgiven him. Even though it was all legal and above board, as I don't doubt it was, still she doesn't like the idea of her brother's circus being run by a man like Jackson. And then, she gets it put in the contract of sale that she's to be allowed to put up her booth on the field whenever she likes. At first you can take it that it was a kind of keeping her eye on things. She didn't like to feel that the circus was going to rack and ruin. But then later, when she got too old to do much work on the musical-hall stage, she made it permanent with the circus and her two daughters put on their act. But all this time it must have been rankling that the old circus wasn't what it used to be, and she must have begun to think that perhaps it would be a good idea if the whole thing busted up. So she predicted a murder. And she told it to Albert. Now for some reason or other Albert seems to be the fool of the show. So why should she tell it to him? Because, you see, he was the only one who would believe her and spread it around. If she'd told anybody else they would have laughed at her and forgotten all about it. But the way she did it, the news spread round very slowly, and did just what she wanted—to make people nervous.”

“And why did she choose the Jubilee performance as the last date?” I asked.

“Well, it was as good a date as any, wasn't it? And her idea
was, no doubt, to make the people so nervous about murders and so on that the Jubilee show was a flop. You know there are always one or two little accidents in a circus during the season, and normally no one thinks twice about them after they've happened. But when everybody's looking for a murder they begin to think each of those accidents is an attempt at one. Just like you did. But, of course, old Margot was a clever old girl, and I wouldn't put it past her to have noticed something of what was going on between Kurt and Ansell. But she didn't know anything else about it than that.”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose once more I've got to congratulate you.”

Beef beamed. “I thought you would. Well, you couldn't help it really, could you? I mean, it sounds so simple when I tell it, but the simplest things are the hardest, very often. You had all the evidence that I had when I made up my mind that Ansell was going to murder Kurt and how he was going to do it. And I don't believe you even suspected it.”

“I can only hope,” I returned, “that the reader will not have suspected it either.”

“Oh, him,” said Beef. “He'll have been jumping about from one to another suspecting each in turn. But that's what you mean him to do, isn't it?”

“I suppose so,” I said, and added thoughtfully: “I shall call it
Case With Four Clowns.
That should help to mislead him.”

“Four clowns?” said Beef. “How do you make that out? There were only three clowns in the ring.”

“Yes, in the ring,” I said, and left him gaping.

THE END