Here Comes a Chopper (12 page)

R
ICHARD
C
ORBET
,
A Proper New Ballad, etc
.

CLAUDIA DENBIES FAILED
to identify the body, except negatively. The police and the mortuary authorities made her task as easy as such a dread ordeal could be by making certain that the fact that the trunk was headless should be kept discreetly veiled.

The proceedings were tactfully conducted, and were soon over. Nevertheless, she fainted at the conclusion of them and was carried into the open air by Roger, who, although he was staggering under her not inconsiderable weight, would not permit a single policeman to touch her.

His feelings, when, having summoned every ounce of muscle and sheer endurance he possessed, he at last got her outside the mortuary and on to the
chair which a kindly young constable immediately slid in position beneath her drooping thighs, were kaleidoscopic. So many-coloured were his emotions, and so rapidly did these colours swim before him, that he could only express himself by kneeling on the concrete surface of the yard. Then, taking Claudia’s head upon his breast, he adjured her in hoarse parenthesis to speak to him.

She complied with a whispered, ‘Darling!’ Roger, who had been prepared in any case to die for her, now felt that he could face burning for her sake. He clasped her closely.

His embraces appeared to revive her. She pushed him away and got up.

‘But it wasn’t—it isn’t—Harry,’ she reiterated, as, with the solicitous young constable—he who had brought the chair—in close attendance, Roger took her tenderly to the gate and out to the car. ‘I’m so certain it wasn’t Harry!’

The inspector, who was also there, coughed aggressively.

‘I’m glad of that,’ said Roger, uttering this dreadful lie without a blush. Why the hell couldn’t it have been Harry, he wondered. And yet—if it lessened her distress—no, even if she loved the brute—it was better, far better as it was. His love was as much in the knight-errant stage as present-day custom and usage will permit. ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost,’ he murmured to himself in the car going back to Whiteledge, quoting a poet whom normally he despised but now found spuriously comforting, ‘than never to have loved at all. But
all the same—he occupied his anguished soul with visions of what might have been, and peopled an island with Claudia, himself and a household of Nubian slaves, whilst Claudia, in the crook of his arm, cried dismally on his shoulder.

By the time they reached Whiteledge Mrs Denbies, however, had recovered. She had made up her face in the car towards the end of the journey whilst Roger, to his tender and tremulous delight, carried out her orders to hold her steady. Her artistry and his devotion were so far attended by success that she was able to present to Lady Catherine a bright smile and the presumably joyful tidings of a still unidentified corpse when the chatelaine met them on the doorstep.

‘Well, it’s rather inconsiderate,’ said Lady Catherine, when she heard what Claudia had to tell. ‘I do think Harry might have saved us all this trouble. I had the ante-room carpet cleaned for Christmas, and now here we are, still only in March, and policemen’s boots all over it! I do think that if people are going away in a huff, and all over nothing at that, they might at least send a message to say that they haven’t tumbled down on the railway line and had their heads cut off. It really is most vexing! Who
is
the wretched man, then?’

Mrs Bradley, returning from lunch with Bob, Dorothy and young George Merrow, heard the tidings from a gloomy inspector who, for reasons best known to himself, was still haunting the house.

‘And my view is she’s lying, mam,’ he observed. Mrs Bradley sought Claudia in her room.

Claudia’s blinds were drawn and the room was almost in darkness. Mrs Bradley, having knocked, went in upon the knock and found Claudia lying fully dressed, except for her shoes, upon the bed, and discovered, by hearing the sounds, that she was crying.

‘So you’ve got your unpleasant job over, and I hear it was not Mr Lingfield,’ said Mrs Bradley, who had the brusque, brisk, female attitude to tears. Claudia sat up, and the bed creaked heavily.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I’ll draw the blinds if you want to talk to me.’ She rose and went over to the window. As soon as she could see clearly enough to find a chair, Mrs Bradley sat down.

Claudia went to the door and turned the key.

‘I’m not crying about Harry,’ she said. She put eau-de-Cologne on a handkerchief and dabbed her forehead with it. ‘I’m crying because I’m in love.’

‘Good heavens!’ said Mrs Bradley with robust, incredulous warmth. ‘Not with that tall thin child who came to dinner last night!’

‘Not exactly, and yet—I don’t know. He’s so very young, and so very sweet——’

‘Now, look here,’ said Mrs Bradley, in admonishing tones but with a cackle, ‘you let him alone, do you hear? A love-sick expression will not suit that Hamlet countenance of his, and neither,’ she added coarsely, eyeing Claudia long and steadily, ‘will the fatuous grin of a corn-fed, high-stepping gelding.
Whatever way you treat him, it will be wrong. You leave the child to his betters, and none of your nonsense! And it won’t do your playing any good, let me tell you that.’

‘But that’s just what it will,’ protested Claudia, betraying not the faintest distaste for Mrs Bradley’s observations. ‘Well, I thought perhaps it would,’ she added, suddenly smiling in her turn. ‘Lately, I don’t know why, I’ve been going off, I think. I need a stimulant.’

‘Try gin,’ said Mrs, Bradley, speaking firmly. ‘But I did not come to talk about your troubles. They are, after all, your own business. I want to know all about the body.’

‘It isn’t Harry, and that’s as much as I can tell you.’

‘I thought you would say that. Go on.’

‘What about? It isn’t Harry, that’s all.’

‘How can you be certain, without seeing the face, I wonder?’

‘By the—there are certain marks.’

‘Well, the body I saw was slightly scarred across the middle of the left buttock. The man was naked when we found him. How long had Mr Lingfield had his scars?’

‘They weren’t scars, and they were on the chest.’

‘How long have you known Mr Lingfield?’

‘Since 1917, I think. He was only nineteen.’

‘Good gracious!’

‘Oh, yes. I knew him before Babbie went into the mental home, and when he was so lonely we
saw a good deal of one another. Of course, I was younger then. Then he gave up everything, left Lady Catherine to look after this house and all his things, and went off exploring and big-game hunting for years.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, to keep his mind off his troubles.’

‘And what were his troubles?’

‘Well, Babbie, I suppose.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘No,’ answered Claudia Denbies, looking away. ‘No, I don’t really think it was that. I don’t know what they were. He wanted me to live with him, and I did, and then I had that long concert engagement in America (although, poor boy, he begged me not to leave him), and when I came back in 1935 he had gone. He—I did not see him again until three years later. We quarrelled very soon after that, and off he went. During the war years I saw him now and again—fairly often, as a matter of fact—as often as he could arrange. We spent all his leaves together, but we couldn’t really agree. Last year we parted for good—at least, that was mentioned, I remember—and the next thing was that Lady Catherine invited me here and—I found him. He seemed very glad to see me. The rest I suppose you can guess.’

‘You agreed to try to agree, but you quarrelled yesterday morning,’

‘And tried to make it up in the afternoon. That’s why we went out riding. We planned to go out alone, but George wanted to join us——’

‘And what was the quarrel about? The police may want to know that.’

‘They won’t believe me when I tell them. You will, but then—you understand how people’s minds work. We quarrelled about Palestrina. That was in the morning.’

‘About Palestrina?’

‘Yes. It began with Palestrina and then went on to Brahms.’

‘You astonish me.’

‘Yes, but you believe it. I’m afraid the inspector won’t. Still, as the dead man isn’t Harry, that doesn’t matter at all.’

‘I’m not so sure of that,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I wonder whether you would object to outlining the quarrel to me?’

Claudia Denbies sighed.

‘It shouldn’t have been Palestrina. He is not a subject for quarrel,’ she observed. ‘But, you see, it began when I happened to remark that Byrd’s songs were intended to be accompanied by four viols.’

‘I think Mr Eric Blom mentions it in his
Music in England
,’ Mrs Bradley remarked. ‘What has it to do with——’

‘Palestrina? Well, Harry said that Byrd was a mere song-thrush compared with Palestrina, and that if Palestrina had had a language as fit as English for setting to the music of the time, Byrd would never have been heard of. And then he said that the Protestants made Byrd famous. Ridiculous, because, of course, Byrd composed as much for the Roman
church as for the reformed church, and, in any case, it is quite absurd to compare Byrd’s secular songs with Palestrina’s plainsong——’

‘I can see how the argument went,’ said Mrs Bradley, realizing, from Claudia’s flushed cheek and curling mouth that, if she did not interrupt it, it would be re-stated all over again. ‘But how did Brahms come into it?’

‘Because he was poor, and disliked England and refused a degree at Cambridge.’

‘Poor?’

‘Not a poor musician. A poor man.’

‘But I can’t see——’

‘Neither could I. All I said was that Brahms performed his own music, and at that—the remark developed quite naturally from what had been said about viols and which had followed on from some talk (quite amicable) about lutes—Harry began to quarrel, saying that I was ignorant and unread, and that musicians had regularly played their own compositions up to and including the seventeenth century—a thing I had never denied—and that to say that a man was a beggar simply because he played what he composed—Oh, it’s no use going over it again. He did—does—know quite a bit about music, but there’s no doubt he was determined to quarrel. There was no other way of looking at it. Then he went on to polyphonic melody, and he became rather horrid. He was obviously determined to upset me.’

‘But why?’ Mrs Bradley enquired.

‘I don’t know. It was all completely unnecessary
and utterly silly, and it made me very unhappy. After all, I don’t care whether Brahms accepted a musical degree at Cambridge or not, and as for Palestrina’s polyphony——’

‘Interesting,’ said Mrs Bradley.

‘Then he proposed this afternoon ride. I didn’t want to go, but when George came and said that Harry had told him we were going and that he should like to go with us—well, one likes to please George——’

Mrs Bradley agreed.

‘But the reconciliation did not take place?’ she asked.

‘Of course it didn’t. We had to send George away home. Harry kept referring, in an oblique sort of way, to the quarrel, so I told George he’d better ride home or he might be late for the party. He didn’t know we were on the verge of another quarrel—at least, I don’t think he knew—but he rode away at once. When he’d gone I let Harry have it.’

‘Oh, you did?’

‘Oh, yes. It was obvious that Harry had no intention whatsoever of making it up. He wanted to feel ill-used, and, when a person wants that, there is nothing for it but to let him have a thundering row or else go away and let him think he has won.’

‘And you weren’t prepared to let him win?’

‘I did go away in the end. He meant I should. But it wouldn’t have been much good to tell the police I did if the body had happened to be Harry’s.
I know they wouldn’t believe it. They always think quarrels lead to murder.

‘It won’t be much good telling it them now,’ said Mrs Bradley.

‘I’m afraid we shall have to make up our minds to that, unless somebody saw him alive after you had returned to the house.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose anybody did,’ said Claudia carelessly. ‘The moor is lonely. It would be the merest accident if anybody had seen him.’

Mrs Bradley went away thoughtfully, and almost bumped into Roger on the threshold of Claudia’s room.

‘She will require some notice before you go in,’ she said. He looked apprehensive and worried.

‘Is she worse?’

‘Worse than what?’

‘Worse than she was this morning at the mortuary.’

‘Why, was she ill at the mortuary?’

‘She fainted. Those brutes! I think the police ought to be——’

‘Hush! Let me tell you something. She probably fainted from relief. The body, she declares, was not that of Harry Lingfield.’

‘You mean——?’ He grew pale—a lover’s pallor. ‘You mean she’s still in love with Lingfield?’

Mrs Bradley wagged her head.

‘Take courage, child,’ she said. But Roger would not be comforted.

‘And what do you mean by that?’ he demanded angrily.

‘That life begins at forty,’ said the reptile, grinning into his flushed face and furious eyes. She passed on and descended the stairs. Roger tapped at Claudia’s door, and waited. He tapped again. The door did not open, and next moment he had joined Mrs Bradley in the hall.

‘She won’t let me in,’ he said, like a sulky child. ‘I had things to say, but she doesn’t want to listen to a word. She told me not to be a nuisance!’

‘I warned you,’ said Mrs Bradley with a cackle. ‘She’s been lying down. Middle-aged women don’t arise from bed looking like Venus Anadyomene, you know. If you wish to see the dawn in your lady’s face you must look at young Dorothy Woodcote.

she continued, regarding him kindly.

Roger snorted in passionate remonstrance.

‘At least,’ he said, ‘Claudia can’t give evidence at that hellish inquest. Will you get her out of it? Surely you could if you tried?’

‘But I myself am most anxious to hear what she has to say at the inquest,’ protested Mrs Bradley.