He performed the introductions with casual efficiency and four faces, one male and three female, peered up into Mr Campion’s own in dreamlike succession. A pair of round dark eyes under grey brows registered on him as he bowed to the third masculine member of the party, and he received a blurred impression of a wedge of a man with a great chest and dwindling legs. But the women meant nothing to him. One was elderly, with an untidy white haircut and black eyes, but she barely spoke to him, fixing her attention entirely on Amanda.
Lee carried him over to the other side of the room, ostensibly to find some sherry.
‘Rather a depressing assembly, I’m afraid,’ he murmured diffidently, ‘but it simply couldn’t be helped. This is municipal intelligentsia, my dear chap. The Bridge Institute may do work of national importance but it’s still the so-called philanthropic little plaything of the Masters of Bridge. There’s something frightful about hereditary possession.’
‘I wonder the State doesn’t take it over,’ said Campion and realized that the observation was idiotic as soon as he had made it.
Aubrey looked at him with bewildered incredulity.
‘Naturally they’d like to,’ he said, ‘but it belongs to the town and it’s pretty much of a financial asset, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, of course. I’d forgotten.’ In spite of his care the final word carried more emphasis than Campion had intended and again his host peered at him with concern.
‘My dear good man, you’re exhausted,’ he said. ‘For heaven’s sake have a drink. Would you rather have something other than this? I don’t want to be an infernal nuisance, but isn’t there anything I can do?’
It went through Mr Campion’s mind to say ‘Yes, find out how I killed a policeman, old boy, and while you’re about it have a squint to see if I’ve cracked my own skull,’ and to observe what happened, but he checked this irresponsibility. He felt as if he were just half drunk, he decided; sober enough to realize that it was definitely not wise to talk.
‘Very kind of you,’ he said, ‘but I’m all right. A little tired, nothing else.’ He had spoken more loudly than he would normally have done and his host recoiled as the words sounded clearly in the hushed and frigid air.
‘I see,’ he said very gently. ‘I see. Do forgive me. Oh yes, wait a minute, here are your letters. I brought them along.’
He took a handful of mail out of the coat pocket of his loose dinner-jacket as he spoke and withdrew at once, with his odd self-conscious diffidence.
Campion glanced at the letters with a slowly growing sense of satisfaction. All but one were re-addressed to him from 17a Bottle Street, Piccadilly, and the sight of his name on several envelopes appeared to lend him, however unreasonably, a certain faith in his own identity.
He opened the letter which had not been re-addressed but had come to him direct at the Bridge Institute and stood looking at a clumsily typed sheet which no one but an executive who normally employed a secretary would have dared to send out. It was headed baldly: ‘My office. The Yard. Tuesday,’ and ran on: ‘Dear A.C. Interesting conversation this afternoon with Pugh, whom T. brought in. Fancy a man called Anscombe is your best bet. He is Secretary to the Masters. Oldish, I think and with a sister. For God’s sake get busy. Keep your eye on the calendar. The figures 15 turn my belly whenever I see or hear them. Nothing else this end. Saw the Minister again. Hardly recognized him. Enjoyed seeing fellow of that type exhibiting the weakness and humanity of the common bloke, but put the wind up me all the same. Forced to rely on you only now. Every other line has gone slack and the time is so short. If you fail, for my part I shall wait until the balloon actually does go up and then swim quietly out to sea. This is a tripey way of putting it but can’t bring myself to put down what I really feel. If this thing happens it is the END and I mean that. I’m not a religious chap, as you know, but I’m praying now literally and if any blasted bobby on the beat wants to see me do it he’s welcome to come in here and look at his Dep. Commish on his knees. Damn you, succeed. S.’
Mr Albert Campion read the letter through twice. The words themselves were convincing enough but there was something else. Something about the note was more than ordinarily startling. Suddenly he recognized what it was. Stanislaus did not write like that in the ordinary way. He accepted the name without realizing that it had not been written in full and concentrated on the really alarming peculiarity. Stanislaus Oates was an old man, a prim, elderly policeman of the oldest school, and he was hysterical. That was horrible, as dreadful as seeing a quarter of the Nelson Column sticking up raggedly against a lowering sky. He crumpled the paper into a ball and thrust it into his pocket until he should get near the fire to destroy it. There were cold waves playing up and down his spine. This was truly frightful. Some terrible responsibility rested upon him and not only had he no recollection of what it was but he was helpless, incapacitated by an obscene mental weakness from doing anything about it.
Amanda’s laugh on the other side of the room cut into his thoughts. He looked across and saw her. She was talking to Lee Aubrey, who was leaning towards her, his big-featured face young and revealing, and a belated puppyishness apparent in his attitude. A servant was at his elbow trying to attract his attention and Campion saw him come out of his mood and turn with a startled expression to follow the man out of the room.
Amanda glanced after him. She was radiant and excited, the entire march of her magnificent common sense and reliability set aside for the sweet, foolish fandango which any lesser woman can dance when she is so minded. Campion stood looking at her and it seemed to him that in that moment he actually struggled up and out of a whole customary system of living and emerged a small naked essence of the basic man. She should not do it. She should not desert him. Pride, manners, custom, the habit of a lifetime, and the training of an ancient system be damned. Amanda was his. He needed her, and God help the man or the woman herself if there was any smashing up of that combine.
He was walking over to her when Lee Aubrey came hurrying in and accosted him. He listened to the murmured words with the sudden chill which a vision of delay presents when an extra snag arises at a time of crisis.
‘The Police?’ he repeated. ‘I can’t see the Police now.’
‘But my dear chap …’ Aubrey’s deep voice was urgent, ‘please, not here.’
Campion followed him out into the wide hall and saw through an open doorway across an expanse of black and white flags the familiar gleam of silver and blue.
‘The whole thing was some idiotic mistake and I can’t spare the time,’ he said savagely.
Aubrey stared at him, his eyes surprised but shrewd.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Campion,’ he said patiently. ‘They’ve come about Anscombe. The poor old boy has just been found dead in his garden and you and Amanda appear to be the last people to have seen him alive.’
V
‘ANSCOMBE?’
As the echo escaped Campion, the personality of the old man as he remembered him slid into the front of his mind with startling vividness. He saw again the ragged silhouette with the flat cap atop as it had heaved towards him so ingratiatingly over the back of the car seat. The recollection of the crumpled letter in his pocket also became very clear before his eyes, like a close-up of a documentary on a movie screen. He could re-read the operative words: ‘… a man called Anscome is your best bet.’
His new mood of reckless determination, which he suspected was completely foreign to his nature, was still in complete possession of him.
‘Dead?’ he said aloud. ‘He would be.’
Aubrey made no direct reply but Campion thought he saw the whites of his eyes for a second.
‘All the same, my dear chap,’ he said at last, his tone only faintly reproving, ‘we must do what we can. There’s a sister, and heaven only knows what other complications. Come on.’
The immense blue great-coat containing the police sergeant moved out of the doorway as they approached and the bright ro
om spread out before them. Lee Aubrey’s private study was an impressive chamber at any time, with its arched bookcases, unexpected curios, and deep green hangings. It was a room with an air, a room used to soothing and entertaining people of widely different types and standards, a diplomat among rooms, gracious and superior, capable of stimulating as well as subduing, but none of its charm cut much ice with the man who stood waiting for them as he warmed the back of his legs before the open fire.
Campion knew he was a County C.I.D. Superintendent the moment he set eyes on him. He knew that as surely and in the same inspirational way that he had known Amanda’s name or where to find a cigarette in the car. There was no mistaking that tall, bright-eyed, smiling superiority combined with a meticulous physical neatness. This last was a muscular and sartorial spit-and-polish, almost naval in its perfection. The stranger was the country policeman at his highest, an impressive specimen anywhere.
Aubrey, whose gaucherie had given place to a remarkable energy apparently engendered by the emergency, thrust his visitor forward.
‘Superintendent Hutch,’ he said briefly. ‘This is Mr Campion, Hutch. Here we are. What can we do?’
‘That’s a question, isn’t it?’ said the Superintendent, revealing an unexpectedly soft country accent, and Campion, glancing up sharply, became aware of the brightest eyes he had ever met smiling into his own with a startling intensity of horse-sense behind them.
The remark was clearly not intended to be taken at its face value. For an appalling instant it occurred to Campion that he had been betrayed and that Aubrey had got him to come quietly by a pretext. His face became wooden and he waited, his hands in his pockets, for the next move.
When it came it surprised him. Superintendent Hutch laughed a little. He might almost have been embarrassed. Glancing down at a disreputable piece of paper in his hand he said formally: ‘You are Mr Campion, are you, sir?’
‘It’s a hundred to one on, I should think, God help me.’ Campion did not say the words aloud, but they came into his mind involuntarily and he smiled, only to freeze a moment later. The Superintendent, catching his expression, had echoed the grin, secretly, alarmingly. His manner then became uncomfortably informal and he spoke as important policemen are apt to speak to cornered delinquents, affably and as if they were part of the family.
‘I just want the usual, you know,’ he said cheerfully. ‘A brief account of your last meeting with the deceased. Where did you leave him and when?’
He had a jaunty manner which sat well on his slightly comical countryman’s face, with the long duck’s-bill nose. He was evidently a local character and was very sure of himself.
Campion took the plunge without a pause. Hesitation, he felt, instinctively, was death.
‘I last saw Anscombe at his own gate,’ he began glibly. ‘We’d come from – er – the town.’
‘What town?’
He had not the least idea. The shaky lands spread out before him and he wavered.
‘I think we ought to have Amanda here.’
‘Amanda, sir?’
‘Yes, my fiancée, Miss …’ The hopeless pitfall loomed too late.
Lee Aubrey was staring at him, but his surprise was not at Campion’s astounding ignorance.
‘I had rather hoped to keep Lady Amanda out of this as long as possible,’ he said briefly. He showed his annoyance and there was a suggestion of colour on his high cheekbones.
Lady Amanda? Lady Amanda who? The utter hopelessness of the situation might have defeated Campion at that moment had it not been for Aubrey’s irritation. Who was Lee Aubrey to spare Amanda? What was this blasted proprietory talk? Damn him and his chivalry!
‘Ah yes, of course, my mistake. That will be Lady A. Fitton, won’t it?’ murmured the Superintendent, glancing down at the slip in his hand.
‘No. It’s Lady Amanda. As the sister of a peer she takes her Christian name.’ Aubrey gave the snippet of information casually and the touch of schoolmaster came oddly from him. ‘Lady Amanda was driving this afternoon. She gave Mr Anscombe a lift into Coachingford when she went to meet Mr Campion off the London express. They were delayed and didn’t get back until just after eight. These are the brief facts. Mr Campion can give you anything else you need, I think. You won’t need to trouble her at all, will you?’
The last words were barely a question. He spoke with the complete assurance of authority.
The Superintendent shifted his weight. He was not a young man and there was a deal of experience in his long head. Campion, who had been sidetracked momentarily by the two valuable names ‘Fitton’ and ‘Coachingford’, was now impressed by his hesitation and it dawned on him that as Principal of the Bridge Institute Aubrey was no ordinary power in the land.
‘I think I ought to see her, sir, if you don’t mind,’ Superintendent Hutch’s soft voice was apologetic and he had a shy way of grinning, as if he had a secret joke on somewhere.
Campion, who was not at all sure that he had not, found the habit disconcerting.
Lee Aubrey clearly found his insistence astounding. He swung round on the policeman.
‘Mr Anscombe died naturally, surely?’
Hutch looked uncomfortable. ‘We’re not absolutely certain, sir. He didn’t do it himself, that’s one sure thing. The Chief Constable is on his way over now. More I can’t say, can I?’
‘Good Lord!’ Aubrey thrust his hands into the pockets of his loose dinner-jacket. Then he whistled and stood for a moment irresolute, staring at the blank wall. At length he turned abruptly. ‘I’ll fetch her,’ he said. ‘Mr Campion will tell you all he can. Apart from everything else this is rather unpleasant. The man lives on the Institute estate.’
He went out, leaving Campion with the two policemen. Hutch said nothing. He stood studying his notes, his head bent earnestly over the small bundle of old envelopes and loose half-sheets of paper on which he appeared to have made them. His hesitation was unnerving. Campion was fully alive to the dangers of his position. Any question about the drive home from Coachingford must, if he stuck to the story Amanda had told Anscombe, introduce the suicidally dangerous subject of hospitals. It was the delay he dreaded most. He was getting a sufficiently clear angle on himself to realize that whatever he might or might not have done, it was no ordinary straightforward crime of violence, and meanwhile there was clearly something of importance for him to do, and to do immediately, if only he could get some sort of line on what it was. What troubled him particularly was that he had a growing conviction that he had been nearing success when disaster had overtaken him. There was a sensation of discovery in the back of his consciousness, an impression that things were moving. Moreover, the curtain between this misery of ignorance and a very clear vision indeed was tantalizingly thin.
Hutch was looking at him with his now familiar half-smile, He was waiting as though he expected Campion to speak first. The man who could not remember took a deep breath.
‘How did Anscombe die?’ he enquired.
The policeman grinned. There was no other word for the terrifying secret leer which spread over his face.
‘We were going to ask you about that, Mr Campion,’ he said.
In the moment of paralysed silence which followed, the step in the doorway behind them came as a merciful release to Campion, and the brisk new voice sounded comfortably commonplace.
‘Hallo, Super. Mr Aubrey here? Oh, it’s you, is it, Campion? What a bad business, eh?’
It was the greeting of a familiar, anyway, and Campion turned towards the newcomer anxiously. He saw a heavy round man in early middle-age, with a distinctive ugly face and impudent eyes beneath brows as fierce and tufted as an Aberdeen’s. He conveyed energy and efficiency and the sturdy decisiveness which goes with a simple point of view and no nerves. It occurred to Campion that he looked like a man who did not believe in ghosts, but for the rest he was as much a stranger as anyone else in this new and confusing world. At the moment he was very full of the story.
‘I’m
supposed to have dropped in for coffee,’ he said, ‘but the chap who let me in tells me you haven’t started to eat yet. He told me this dreadful tale about Anscombe, too. Poor old boy! He couldn’t face it, I suppose. Or am I letting cats out of bags?’
The Superintendent eyed him.
‘It wasn’t suicide, Mr Pyne.’
‘Wasn’t suicide?’ The newcomer seemed first astounded and then embarrassed. ‘Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ he said. ‘What a gaffe! Lucky there were only you two to hear me. I’m always putting my foot in it like that. There’s been a lot of gossip about, you know. You’ve heard it, haven’t you, Super? About the Secretaryship of the Masters.’
‘Seems to me I did hear something.’ Hutch was very cautious.
‘You must have done.’ Pyne’s eyes were amused beneath his tremendous brows. ‘It’s been told me in strictest confidence by everyone I’ve met in the last three months. I heard that the job, like all these hereditary offices, took a fine old packet to keep up, and that the old man was on the verge of a smash and had made up his mind to resign. Naturally, as soon as I heard he was a deader I thought he’d done it himself. One would. It breaks an old man’s heart to give up a position carrying a bit of kudos like that, especially when it’s been in the family for generations. The Bi-Annual Meeting of the Masters is sometime this week, too, isn’t it?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Is it? Very likely. They’re such a secret high-and-mighty body that they don’t trouble to publish a little thing like that.’ He laughed. ‘I like it,’ he said. ‘It appeals to the kid in all of us, that kind of mumbo-jumbo, even if it is only a sort of glorified parish council.’
The Superintendent looked frankly scandalized and Pyne, catching Campion’s eye, burst out laughing. It was a pleasant, open sound, a trifle high-pitched like his voice but full of limited humour.
‘We’re philistines, we Londoners,’ he said. ‘The Masters are sacrosanct down here in Bridge. I’m sorry, Super. I’m behaving disgustingly. Poor old Anscombe! I didn’t know him well, of course. I’d only met him once or twice. You didn’t know him at all, did you, Campion?’
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