GFU04 - The Cornish Pixie Affair

by Peter Leslie

  "I'm all ears," Slate said. "Let me get you another brandy first, though." He crossed to the bar, returned with the two glasses and signalled the waiter to bring them more coffee.

  "This seems like a simple — in fact, rather a sordid — case of murder," the superintendent resumed when the man had poured and gone. "Gay girl works for a circus. Gay girl settles down when she meets poor but honest boyfriend also working at the circus. A marriage is arranged. Settled-down girl goes gay again when she meets rich sophisticate. Big trouble with honest B, who is madly jealous."

  "Jealous enough to kill?"

  "Possibly. That's what we have to discover. At any rate, gay girl ends up done in — either by her young friend out of jealousy, or by her older friend because she was becoming a nuisance and he was afraid his wife might find out."

  "Oh, he's married then?"

  "Aren't they always?"

  "Yes, I suppose they are. You said the girl and her boyfriend both worked at the circus, didn't you?"

  "I did. The boy's father owns the concern; his mother does the palmistry bit; a sister is the equestrienne; one brother acts as ringmaster and another has a candid-camera seaside snapshot concession."

  "Practically a family business, then?"

  "Practically. There are a few hired hands — but the old man's tough about the money. They have to pay for their concessions, family or not. Most of these small travelling circuses are like that. Down here in the southwest, we're one of the few areas still rural enough to support them. You have to have a region where they'll go out to be entertained, where the box isn't in every village parlour... Where was I? — Oh, yes: the boyfriend himself. He's a nice enough lad, always seemed a bit of a tearaway, though. Villainous temper, too. He acts as general dogsbody around the circus in summer; takes the money and that. But in the winter he spends most of his time at his wheel, turning souvenirs for the girl to sell."

  "What kind of souvenirs?" Slate asked.

  "Oh... ashtrays, lighthouses, trinket boxes, Cornish pixies. You know."

  "And the girl sold them?"

  "Yes, she had a concession from the old man to run a little kiosk. Most of the boy's output was unloaded there — though some of the stuff's given away as prizes at the other sideshows. Most of it's Serpentine. Know what that is?"

  "It's a hydrated silicate of magnesium, isn't it? Occurring in this part of the country probably as a rock vein formed by the metamorphosis of Dolomites or igneous extrusions rich in magnesium," Slate returned glibly.

  Superintendent Curnow burst out laughing. "There was a saying when I was a lad," he exclaimed, "that you mustn't teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Sorry I underestimated your general knowledge! As far as I'm concerned, Serpentine is simply that mottled red and green stone that can be cut and turned and polished up a treat!"

  "The girl," Slate pursued. "Was it her own booth where she was found dead?"

  "Bless you, no. A sideshow operated by one of the hired help. He puts on a clown's rig and the local corner-boys let off steam by pelting him with balls of cotton wool. Gets rid of all their aggression, too!"

  "And someone else had got rid of their aggression on the lady, in the same booth?"

  "Yes. Not with cotton wool missiles, though. There were three of those hard wooden balls from the coconut-shy beneath the body."

  "Wooden and not woollen... Good Lord! You don't mean that she was killed... that somebody held her up and... and chucked... But that's horrible!"

  "Murder's a horrible business, Mr. Slate, at the best of times. But that is what somebody wanted us to believe," Curnow said soberly.

  "Wanted you to believe?"

  The policeman nodded. "Metcalf, the police surgeon, has established that the cause of death was a severe blow on the head — it could have been any one of several he found on the frontal region and cranium," he said.

  "And...?"

  "The only thing is, there are four of these whacking great contusions, any one of which might have caused death — but only three balls."

  Slate whistled quietly. "so maybe she was killed by the traditional blunt instrument — and the balls were thrown afterwards?"

  "That's one possibility. Another is that the murderer hurled three balls, found that they hadn't done their job properly, and finished her off with your blunt instrument. A third is that he picked up one of the balls and threw it a second time... which seems to me unlikely, since there's a great pile of them at the coconut-shy, and it would have been quicker to have taken another of those than to have gone up to the kiosk and retrieved one of the original three. The pathologist's report — when we get it — should help sort that one out."

  "Pathologist's report? Not the Home Office Pathologist? You're not calling in Scotland Yard?"

  "No, Mr. Slate, we are not. That happens rather less in fact than in fiction. Mostly, the County Forces are quite capable of handling their own murders. And our equipment does include pathologists."

  "My apologies. I stand corrected — and ashamed! It's a daunting thought, though, just the same — someone standing back and cold-bloodedly chucking those things at a live, or at the most unconscious... Hey! Just a minute!" He paused in mid-sentence, his eyes wide.

  Curnow nodded again. "Exactly," he said. "Chucking them at what? The girl wasn't going to stand up voluntarily as Aunt Sally for a madman. But there were no marks of ropes or bonds on her. Therefore she must have been either unconscious or dead when the balls were thrown — in which case someone else must have held her up as a target."

  "Enter an accomplice, in fact."

  "Exactly. And with two people involved, this grisly little scene becomes even more bizarre, don't you think?"

  "I do. But why the set-up in the first place? If they really wanted you to think she was killed by the coconut-shy balls, surely they'd have been clever enough to have checked that there were the right number?"

  "You'd think so, wouldn't you? As I see it, the girl must have been already dead before they thought of the idea. It must have been an improvisation. Otherwise minds tortuous enough to have conceived the idea at all would certainly have been sufficiently imaginative to have made it more believable."

  "Yes, but why bother at all? Why use a booth in the first place?"

  "There can only be two reasons: either as a pure red herring, or as a means of obliterating some clue to the murderer which lay in the blow already struck. The wound might have pointed to an identifiable instrument, perhaps, which could be linked only to one person."

  "I see that; but it's still pretty odd, isn't it?"

  Curnow laid down his empty coffee cup and pushed away his saucer. "It is that," he said. "For there are the break-ins as well, aren't there?"

  "Break-ins?"

  "Yes. The dead girl's booth — not the one where she was found, but her own place, the one where she sold the pixies — was broken into last night and again this morning, despite the police guard on the field."

  "Good Lord! Was anything taken?"

  "Not so far as we can see. And that makes it odder still. For you must admit that all this elaborate flummery with the coconut-shy, plus the matter of the burglarious entries — well, they hardly add up to the normal pattern you find in a crime of jealousy, now do they?"

  "I guess not," Mark Slate admitted "But do they fit in with the personalities involved? Are either of the characters capable of this kind of thinking? Does your hot-tempered circus boy or his rival... who is the Other Man, by the way?"

  The policeman rose to his feet abruptly. "Don't want to prejudice you with local gossip," he mumbled, sticking a pipe into his mouth and slapping at his pockets in search of matches. "Better if you kept an open mind, really. Maybe a fresh outlook would be a help. In the meantime, I'll be going up-along to have another word with the circus people in a few minutes, if you'd care to come with me."

  Slate regarded him curiously for a moment. "I should like that very much, thanks," he said at length. "Being present at a real investigation will g
ive me some splendid background material in case I should ever want to write one up in the future... Excuse me just a moment, will you, while I nip up to my room and fetch a waterproof?"

  In the comfortable bedroom with its sloping ceiling and the mullioned window overlooking the harbour and the cliffs beyond, he snatched his raincoat from a hanger and took a contraption shaped like a large fountain pen from his inside breast pocket. Plucking the clip lying alongside its barrel, he slowly extended a miniature telescopic aerial and then raised the device towards his lips.

  "Hallo? Hallo?" he said softly, thumbing a button on the instrument's side. "Slate to R.S.2, London. Are you with me? Over."

  "I hear you loud and clear," a disembodied voice whispered from the tiny two-way radio in his hand. "Over."

  "Message for Waverly in New York, topmost priority," Slate breathed. "Elimination of our agent G.7. definitely villainous. Stop. Suspicions aroused but not, repeat not, confirmed that this is professional rather than personal. Stop."

  He paused and looked out of the window. Rain was drumming on some projection of the roof below; there was a lather of surf fringing the granite face of the headland on the far side of the bay.

  "I am receiving you loud and clear," the voice from the transceiver reminded him "Do you have anything more to add?"

  The agent started. "Sorry," he said. "Yes, I have. Message continues. Reluctance to sing characterises local reaction. Stop. In these circumstances, propose to follow up line of enquiry initiated by G.7 Stop. Will advise progress and cast list by cabled cipher tonight. Stop. Message ends... You'll get that off right away, won't you?"

  "Right away," the voice repeated. "Though Waverly won't even have started his breakfast yet!... Still, that'll be your worry when you want your expense sheet okayed! Over and out…"

  The man from the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement grinned, scooped his car keys off the dressing table, slung his coat over his shoulders, and left the room whistling.

  CHAPTER THREE: THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE NO BUSINESS

  WET canvas flapped mournfully in the rising wind as Curnow and Mark Slate pulled up between the Big Top and the lines of caravans. Close to, the living quarters of the circus staff presented a very different picture to that held by romantics of the Lavengro persuasion: far from being a collection of gaily painted wooden vehicles with stove pipe chimneys and yellow shafts, most of them were sleek, modern residential machines, tailored to the exigencies of a nomad life. A few of the caravans were expensively converted motor buses or vans, but the majority were aluminium-bodied trailers, some extraordinarily long, with heavy tow-bars for attachment to the collection of second-hand American cars which filled the parking lot at the bottom of the field.

  Slate put one foot to the ground and eased himself up and out of a bright blue sports car shaped like a dart with a squared-off tail. The hardtop coupe body was slung completely between the wide-base wheels, with no overhang at front, back or sides, and the rear window couldn't have been more than five degrees off the horizontal.

  The superintendent squelched across the wet grass from his Wolseley. "I say," he remarked admiringly, "that's quite a machine you have there, Mr. Slate. Fairly streaked up the hill, she did — and I can't say that I even recognise the marque. What is it then?"

  "It's a Matra-Bonnet Djet, actually," the agent said, with that deprecatory smugness common the world over to the owners of expensive machinery when approached by envious but idolatrous paupers. "As you say, she goes like the hammers. Best sports car the French have produced for decades. There are disadvantages, all the same. Vision's a bit restricted, for one thing, especially rearwards. For another, it makes a bit too much noise for comfort when some of your chaps are on the warpath! And of course it does get pretty warm in there — technically, I suppose it's a rear-engined car, but the motor's ahead of the back axle ... which means in practice that it's about a hundred and eighty degrees Fahrenheit just behind one's hip. The engine room's in that great hump between and behind the front seats there!" He slammed shut the wide door and they tramped over the muddy ground to wards the caravans.

  The rain stopped and the sound of the sea rolled up from beyond the harbour as they climbed the steps of a huge trailer in polished aluminium. The garish slogan streaming across its front below the roof said, Bosustow's Circus — All The Fun of the Fair on your Doorstep!

  Ephraim Bosustow, the proprietor, was a red faced man of 65 with a surly manner and twin tramlines of irritation scoring his brow.

  He pushed away a sheaf of papers and rose to his feet as the Superintendent knocked to enter a living space as well designed and fitted with gleaming woods as the Captain's quarters on a flagship. "I've told 'ee afore, Mr. Curnow," he said in exasperation, "that I have nowt more to say. I already told your young feller everything there was to know 'smorning. And again yesterday, if it come to that, when you was by 'ere yourself. Can't for the life of me think what questions there are left to ask."

  "Terribly sorry to trouble again," Curnow said soothingly. "But there are certain things we have to go over again and again. Murder is one of them. Now exactly what do you recall of the events leading up to the discovery of the body?"

  "I told 'ee. Sweet damn-all. Being up late the night afore, I'd slept late — and the first thing I knew, young Tommy Bascoe was here, batterin' on the door and yellin' blue murder... Well, you know what I mean…"

  "And you came straight out, went with him to the booth, and then drove down to the police station to report the murder?"

  "After we'd had a bit of a chinwag, yes. But you know that."

  "I only know what I've been told, Mr. Bosustow. What had you to discuss? Why did you not come at once?"

  "We don't get murders every day," the old man said sullenly. "Nobody knew quite what to do, who we ought to call."

  "But you did know it was murder?"

  "Now you're twisting what I say. Trust a ruddy copper! One of the reasons we rabbited so long was because we didn't know how she had died. There was nothing to show. Some of us wanted to move her and call a doctor; others said it might be foul play and we'd better leave her be."

  Abruptly, Curnow varied his attack. "Miss Duncan was engaged to be married to your son," he said. "Did you approve?"

  "My youngest son. I didn't approve or disapprove. Long as they paid me the rent for the concessions, their private life was their own affair."

  "But you were upset when your prospective daughter-in-law was killed?"

  "'Course I was upset. And then again I don't know how I'm goin' to get someone else to take over the souvenir kiosk at this time of the year. There's not a soul visiting the side- shows this month, the boy's been put off his stonework by some fool trouble or other, and your bloomin' town council duns me every week for some absurd sum for rent for this waterlogged field."

  "I don't know," Curnow said, "you seem to be doing alright every time I pass. Plenty of people in — especially the kids."

  "Rubbish!" the proprietor said angrily. "They come in to rubberneck, not to spend. I'm practically bankrupt, if you must know. There isn't an ounce of business left in this Godforsaken part of the country, not after September."

  "I understand there had been trouble between Miss Duncan and your son over another man," Curnow said. "What was it all about? Is he so hotheaded?"

  Bosustow shrugged. "I know nothing about their affairs," he said. "I told you, as long as they pay their debts, they're free to do as they like."

  The old man stubbornly refused to be drawn any further on the subject of his youngest son's impending marriage, his mercurial temperament, and his relations, good or bad, with the girl who had been about to become his wife.

  "It's a rum go, Mr. Slate, if you ask me," Curnow said as they made their way to the caravan occupied by Bosustow's eldest son. "A very rum go. There's something funny about this affair, mark my words. We get a feeling in my business — and I feel sure there's something being held back here."

  "By Bos
ustow himself, or in the circus generally?" Slate asked.

  "All over," the policeman replied. "You see if I'm not right."

  And in truth the reception they met with this time did nothing to confound his words. Harry Bosustow was as red-faced as his father, but stockier and even more ill-tempered to look at. He was sitting at a desk in the huge converted pantechnicon in which he lived, scowling at a strip of negatives which he was holding up to the light. More lengths of film were pegged to a line stretching from side to side of the caravan, and at the farther side of this a brassy blonde with too much makeup and bowed legs was totting up figures in a thick ledger. The sycamore panelling and fitted furniture was as sterile and impersonal as the neat home of Bosustow senior.

  "You again!" the man said after they had knocked and entered. "I thought we'd seen the last of you. What more do you want to know?... And in any case, couldn't you do your cross-examination somewhere else? My wife, as you see, looks after the box-office and the general finances of this show — and there's an audit due at any day. So any questioning or cross-examination in here is bound to disturb her. And I do feel —"

  "Look, Mr. Bosustow, cut that out," Curnow rapped. "This is a murder investigation and I don't give a damn about auditors or accountants or anybody else who attempts to get in my way. You seem to forget — all of you — that a woman has been done to death on your property. For all the signs of regret that I've seen, she might as well have been a stranger, but she was in fact almost a relative. I shall ask as many questions as I want — and if you know what's good for you, you and your brothers will answer them..."

  The man shrugged angrily and threw down the strip of film. "People waiting for their prints," he muttered. "How can I build up a candid connection if I keep on being interrupted? Delivering on time's half the battle in this game."

  "I only have one question to ask you," Curnow said, repressing a smile. "People say your intended sister-in-law was two-timing your young brother with an older man, a local man with a lot of money. D'you know if that was true?"