Dancers in Mourning (40 page)

He paused questioningly.

Sutane nodded gravely. ‘Go on,' he said.

Campion's precise voice wavered as he took up the tale.

‘His first reaction was fear, naturally,' he murmured. ‘Fear and then rage. He caught hold of her by the throat and before he realised at all what had happened her knees sagged and he felt her go limp. She was dead. The
status lymphaticus
accounted for that. He didn't know about that then, of course, and he must have been terrified. He only saw that she was suddenly and unaccountably dead and the whole miserable secret must come out, with scandal and ruin in its tail.

‘I think the gramophone must have finished about that time, for he turned the record over, not realising that the piece of trivia on the other side was hardly the sort of thing she would ever play. It was a natural thing for him to do. It was a subconscious effort to keep things as they were, you see, an instinctive attempt to delay the moment of disaster.

‘After that I fancy he lost his head completely. He picked her up and carried her as far away from the house as he could. That was unreasoning instinct too. He was so careless that he left the gramophone running, trod on a record and dropped her red silk skirt, which had been tied tightly round her waist, and which he must have loosened in his first frantic efforts to revive her. The skirt fell on the grass, where someone else found it and danced on it.

‘All this was done madly in his first terror, but when he came to the bridge his mind began to work again. The car was there and it put an idea in his head. He pitched her over into the lane and staged the accident. It wasn't murder the first time. That's the whole ghastly pity of it.'

Sutane was still lying on the shallow steps, his eyes quiet and without expression.

‘Why hadn't she come out with it before?' he demanded, bitterness in his voice for the first time. ‘Why leave her rotten story until now? Why give the poor beast years of peace and then spring it on him?'

Campion did not look up.

‘Money, don't you think?' he suggested gently. ‘She came back and found – or thought she found – him rich. She didn't want the man. She wanted to be bought off.'

Sutane laughed. The violent explosive sound echoed over the garden and startled the birds in the ornamental cherry trees.

‘I never saw it, Campion,' he said huskily. ‘I never saw it. It would have been so easy.'

Campion passed his hand over his forehead and found it damp. It was a mad interview, a conversation in a dream, with nothing solid or static in the world, only a sense of inexorable disaster coming nearer and nearer every second.

‘Konrad saw him,' he said. ‘Or the husband thought he saw him. Konrad sneaked out about that time to telephone his accomplice and report the success of his surprise party. The following morning he began to talk wildly up in the dressing-room. Then he appropriated the handbag. Then he threatened. The husband got frightened. He instigated a search of Chloe's rooms. The marriage certificate was found and burnt. Chloe was buried. He felt safe again, or almost safe. There was only Konrad to consider. But Konrad looked dangerous and in the end the husband committed the intolerable, incredible folly of deciding to shut his mouth.

‘There was a man called Kummer in Vienna, a brilliant chemist with a crooked streak, the kind of person a young bohemian in Paris just after the War might easily have got to know. He was not hard to get hold of now, for a man with friends among the intelligentsia abroad. Need I go on?'

Sutane laid the back of his hand over his face. It was ballet rather than theatre and was oddly expressive.

‘Those other people …' he said. ‘Oh God! those other people …'

The sun had sunk down behind the house and they were in the shadow. Linda and Slippers had passed out of sight. The kitchen lawn was silent and in her swing-couch Eve appeared to be asleep.

In the silence Mercer's little tunes came floating out caressingly, their sentimental meanderings flirting idly with the memory. An older melody than the rest caught Campion's attention. It reminded him vividly of his first arrival at the house. The name of the song slipped up in his mind – ‘Water-Lily Girl.' He remembered Chloe playing it as she sat beside the disgruntled composer and he saw again her raddled face, with the light grey over-bright eyes, turned archly towards the embarrassed man. He saw the scene clearly; Chloe playing the song all the way through, with obstinate insistence on each sickly phrase. Mercer was playing it like that now, almost as though he were caricaturing it.

As Campion listened to him a further memory returned to his mind. He went back to his undergraduate days and saw himself drinking coffee in a shabby tea shop in a Cambridge back street where, behind a thin green curtain, an appalling gramophone ground out the plummy mouthings of a tenth-rate ballad singer.

He sat up as the significance of the doggerel sank into his mind. That, then, had been Chloe's invitation to the meeting. There had been no note or hurried word during the flurry of the day, as he had supposed. The arrangement had been made then, under his nose. He understood at last her insistence on the verse of the song.

As the little piece of jigsaw dropped into place his mind jolted. A new thought clamoured at him. Sutane had not been there. Sutane had been out in the hall, rehearsing. He himself had not set eyes on the man before lunch.

As he sat stiffly, his eyes fixed upon the middle distance, his brain seemed suddenly to turn over in his head. It was a definite physical experience and was comparable to the process which takes place when an unexpected train in the underground station appears from what is apparently the wrong tunnel and the mind slips over and adjusts the phenomenon by turning the universe other side out, substituting in one kaleidoscopic second east for west.

Eve had been in the room that Sunday morning and so had Sock, but Chloe had been playing to Mercer.

Campion stared at the new vista.

Squire Mercer.

Mercer, who never considered anyone except himself, not only as a main rule but down to the smallest and most trivial circumstance. Mercer, who honestly thought himself all-important, and because of his gifts was tolerated and encouraged by his friends.

Mercer, who had the one type of mind which was sufficiently ingenious and devoid of humour to conceive the dreadful and ludicrous bicycle-lamp grenade, a notion quite as laughable and quite as horribly effective as the notorious Mr Smith's recipe for murdering wife after wife in the cracked baths of second-rate boarding houses.

Mercer, who would not be particularly disturbed by the news that a number of strangers had met with an appalling accident on a railway station, so long as it took place twenty miles out of his sight.

Campion bent forward, his head in his hands. His mind had become very clear. He had the illusion of thinking very slowly.

Mercer had taken an overdose of quinine immediately after hearing on the 8.45 News Bulletin the news of the disaster at Boarbridge. He had then developed, or said he had developed, severe cinchonism, which was a peculiar condition inasmuch as any doctor consulted had only the patient's word for the symptoms experienced – blindness, shakiness, headache, congestion of the middle ear. All these things could be simulated very easily by a man who was afraid his nerves might give him away during an awkward interview with the police.

Campion's mind travelled back to the night of Chloe's death. Mercer had been in the little music-room with the window open. It was practically Mercer's own room. He certainly used it more often than anyone else. Campion remembered that window. He himself had slid out through it during his experiment with the weights from the kitchen scales. He remembered the hard turf below it and the straight path leading right through the garden to the lake. A man might slip out on to the dark lawn and back through that window a dozen times without being missed.

He thought of Kummer.

Kummer had come to London and had put up at a small hotel in Victoria. It had been assumed that the man had been in England for some time. But there was now the likelihood that he had only just arrived.

If Mercer's cinchonism was fictitious, why should he have gone to London on Friday to see a specialist? Suppose, instead, he had gone to see Kummer? Mercer could not or would not drive a car, but he knew where Sock kept his coupé, parked in the open street.

Suppose Yeo's piece of reconstruction had been the truth and Mercer had indicated the car standing at the end of the cul-de-sac, and had asked Kummer to drive him back to his cottage on the White Walls estate? Suppose he had sat beside the man until the convenient moment had arrived and had then whipped the rug over his head and had killed him with Sock's spanner, battering out his brains with all the frenzied terror of the man not naturally violent?

The Superintendent's cautious conferences on the telephone returned to his ears. He had spoken of Petrie's trick. Suppose Mercer had pushed the car on to the verge after Kummer was dead and had then walked back to Boarbridge station, and had waited there for his own chauffeur, who naturally assumed that he had come down by his ordinary late train?

Mercer had gone to Paris on the Tuesday after Chloe's death, when the bicycle was already in the house and Konrad had already made his threat. If to Paris, why not to Vienna, a few hours' flying distance beyond?

The whole series of murders had been so utterly careless. As Yeo had said, the man responsible was evidently blind to his danger. His crimes were the crimes of one who was a little god in his own circle. Who then was the little god of this circle? Not Sutane, who was the worker, the man who recognised his responsibilities and was secretly appalled by them, but Mercer, who was cozened, flattered and protected until his opinion of his own importance lost all touch with reality.

Campion scrambled to his feet.

The significance of Yeo's message through the Superintendent had burst upon him. Yeo now knew the truth and erroneously supposed that he, Campion, had known it all the time. It was Mercer who had married Chloe, Mercer who had derived from the very briefness of his association with her the inspiration for his embarrassingly poignant music. It was Mercer's name in the tuppenny notebook, Mercer's name in the register at the Brixton church.

Relief burst over Campion, engulfing him, soothing him, comforting him with the old magic cry of his childhood – ‘It isn't true!' He was free. The load was lifted. Sutane was not the man. Linda – Sarah – Sock – Eve – the theatre – the house – the lovely excitement of those dancing feet – they were all miraculously saved on the brink of disaster. He had been gloriously wrong. It was not true!

He paused. Through the overwhelming flood which lifted him out of himself he heard the tinkle of the piano and with that sound came a new recollection which stopped his heart.

There was an obstacle.

There remained the unanswerable consideration which had struck Mercer from his list of suspects from the very beginning. Mercer had an alibi for the hour of Chloe's death.

All that evening he had been playing in the music-room and the one man whose word on such a vital matter Campion would have taken without question had been sitting there listening to him – Uncle William, faulty but incorruptible, human but honest as the day.

Campion moved slowly across the terrace and stood looking into the house through the wide French window. In the shadow at the far end of the morning-room he saw the crown of Mercer's untidy black head above the angle of the piano top. His glance travelled forward and he caught his breath.

In the deep arm-chair, his chubby feet crossed, his hands folded on his paunch, the empty decanter at his side and his crimson face immobile in the sleep of the happily drugged, lay Uncle William human.

A herd of buffalo in the room might conceivably awaken him within the hour, but very little else would disturb that deep and alcoholic peace.

Campion stepped back and turned abruptly at the top of the steps to find Sutane beside him. The dancer's angular and expressive body was relaxed and his arms hung at his sides.

‘Keep Eve out of it,' he said softly. ‘They were in the midst of one of those wild, impossible love affairs when it happened, you see. She was so jealous of Chloe at first and then after the woman's death he altered and she couldn't understand it at all, poor little beast. That's why she ran away. She couldn't bear to look at him any more. I hunted for her all over the place. I gave up the show on Friday night to go down and see her once Sock found out where she was. I got it all out of her then.'

He sighed and peered into Campion's face.

‘They'd kept it a secret, knowing I wouldn't approve.'

Campion looked at the other man steadily.

‘How long have you known the truth about Mercer?'

Sutane stared at him.

‘I saw him,' he said. ‘I thought you knew. My dear fellow, I saw him on the bridge. He pitched her clean under my wheels.'

He came a step nearer and his deeply-lined face was desperately sincere.

‘I didn't dream he'd go on,' he said earnestly. ‘I got hold of the certificate and I burned it because I knew he'd never think of it. But I didn't dream he'd go on. After Boarbridge I had to have you here. I
had
to, Campion! Don't you see, you were my conscience. You had to find him out. But I didn't direct you. I couldn't give him away. We were together in Paris after the War. I was his only friend and oh, my dear chap, don't you see, I was the beggar who pinched his wife.'

There was a whirr of gears at the drive gates and as they glanced up two police cars crackled smoothly over the gravel towards the front door.