by Ellis Peters
The telephone bleated in a quavering voice which at first he hardly recognised for Bennie Blocksidge’s. “Mr. Felse?” it wailed. “Oh, Mr. Felse, I dunno if I’m doing right, but I’d sooner it was you, and you’re the nearest, and being as you were here tonight it’s you I called. We got bad trouble here, Mr. Felse. It’s the guv’nor, Mr. Armiger. He never come back. Past closing-time, and he never come, and eleven, and half past eleven, and the lights still on in there. And Mr. Calverley got worried, and one thing and another, even if he did say not to disturb him, they went to see was he all right, , , “
“Make it short,” said George, groping for his slippers. “What’s happened? I’m on my way, but what’s happened? Make it three words, not three hundred.”
“He’s dead,” said Bennie, making it two. “there in the barn, all by himself, stone dead and blood all over.”
CHAPTER III.
THE MOMENT OF truth had overtaken Armiger in the middle of an expanse of new flooring almost big enough for a bull-ring, and of a colour not so far from that of fine sand. He lay in the full glare of his brand-new lights, sprawled on his face with arms and legs tossed loosely about him, his right cheek flattened against the glossy parquet. If you stooped to look carefully the thick profile in its bold, bright colouring still showed clear and undamaged; but the exposed back of his head was crumpled and indented, welling dark blood that oozed up out of the splintered cavities and spilled sluggishly over into the puddle gathering on the floor, where the crimson of blood and the thin clarity of wine met and intermingled in long, feathery fronds of pink.
All round his head and shoulders blood and champagne had spattered to a distance of two or three feet, but not so lavishly as old Bennie had made out, you could easily approach him between the splashes, at least from the back, from which position, George thought, squatting over the body, this ferocious damage had been done. Any enemy of Alfred Armiger’s might well prefer not to face him when he hit out at him at last. The neck of the magnum lay in the pink ferns of the pool, close to the shattered head, and slivers of glass glittered on the bull shoulders; two yards away the rest of the bottle lay on its side, a thin dotted line of blood marking where it had rolled when it broke at last.
Well at least, thought George grimly, we’re spared the classic hesitation between accident, suicide and murder; the one most easily associated with Armiger was the one that overtook him, and nobody’s ever going to argue about it.
He had called his headquarters in Comerbourne before he left home, called them again after his first check-up on the scene, and turned everyone else out of the ballroom until the van should arrive. He had the place to himself for a quarter of an hour at the most. For Armiger he felt as yet nothing but a sense of shock and incredulity that so much demoniac energy could be so abruptly wiped out of existence. The blob of black in the acres of pallor looked like a squashed fly on a window-pane.
He stood back carefully, avoiding the splashes of blood, and looked round the room. No sense of reality informed this scene, it was a stage set, lavish and vulgar, the curtain rising on a run-of-the-mill thriller. The barn, pretty clearly, had once been the hall of the older house. Its proportions were noble, and its hammer-beam roof had been beautiful until Armiger got at it. His impact had been devastating; the hammer-beams and posts, the principals and curved braces and purlins had all been gilded, and the squares of common rafters between the gold had been painted a glaring glossy white, while from the centre beam depended four spidery modern electric chandeliers. The concentration of reflected light was merciless. All round the upper part of the walls he had built a gallery, with a dais for the band at one end, and a glass and chromium bar at the other, a double staircase curving up to it from the dancing floor with an incongruous Baroque swirl. Beneath the gallery the walls were lined with semi-circular alcoves fitted with seats, in every alcove an arched niche with a white plaster dancer; Empire, this part of it, if it could be said to have a style at all. Small tables nestled in the curves of the balustrade all the way round the gallery. The walls were white and gold and a glitter of mirrors. The palais crowd, thought George, dazed, will love it. Poor Leslie Armiger, he’d never see his beautiful bare, spacious studio home again. He’d never have been able to afford to heat it properly, in any case, it would have been Arctic in winter.
So much for the setting in general. Of notable disarrangements in this vacant and immaculate order there were only two, apart from the body itself. One of the plaster statuettes, from the alcove on the right of the door, lay smashed at the foot of the wall. There was no apparent reason for it, it was a good fifty feet from where Armiger lay, and apart from the broken shards there was no sign of any struggle, no trace even of a passing foot. The other detail struck a curiously ironical note. Someone, almost certainly Armiger himself, had fetched two champagne glasses from the bar and set them out on the small table nearest to the gilded dais at the top of the staircase. Evidently he had had no forewarning, he had still been in high feather, still bent on celebrating; but he had never got as far as opening the magnum.
George paced out thoughtfully the few yards between the sprawling feet in their hand-made shoes, and the foot of the staircase. No marks on the high gloss of the floor. He eyed the broken magnum; there was not much doubt it was the instrument which had killed Armiger. It was slimed with his blood right to the gold foil on the cork, and no artificial aids were necessary to see clearly the traces of his hair and skin round the rim of the base.
George cast one last look round the glaring white ballroom, and went out to the three men who waited nervously for him in the courtyard.
“Which of you actually found him?”
“Clayton and I went in together,” said Calverley.
There was a sort of generic resemblance in all the men Armiger chose as managers for his houses, and it struck George for the first time why; they were all like Armiger. He singled out people of his own physical and mental type, and what could be more logical? This Calverley was youngish, thick-set but athletic, like an ex-rugby-player run very slightly to flesh; moustached, self-confident, tough as fibre-glass. Not at his debonair best just now, understandably; the face made for beaming good-fellowship was strained and greyly pale, and the quick eyes alert for profit and trouble alike were trained on trouble now, and saw it as something more personal than he cared for. He’d even gone to meet trouble halfway, it seemed, by arming himself with a companion. People whose daily lives were spent in Armiger’s vicinity soon learned to be careful.
“What time would that be?” They’d know, to the minute; they’d been watching the clock for him over an hour, waiting to get him off the premises and call it a day.
“About four or five minutes after midnight,” said Calverley, licking his lips. It was not yet one o’clock. “We gave him until midnight, that’s how I know. We’d been waiting for him ever since closing-time, but he’d said he didn’t want to be disturbed, so, well, we waited. But from half past eleven we began to wonder if everything was all right, and we said we’d give him until twelve, and then go in. And we did. When it struck we left the snug at once, and came straight over here.”
“All the lights were on like that? You touched nothing? Was the door open or closed?”
“Closed.” Clayton fumbled a cigarette out of the pocket of his tight uniform jacket, and struck a match to light it. A lean, wiry, undatable man, probably about thirty-five, would look much the same at sixty; flat sandy hair brushed straight back from a narrow forehead, intelligent, hard eyes that fixed George unblinkingly and didn’t mind the light. And his hands were as steady as stone. “I was first in, I handled the door. Yes, the lights were on. We never touched a thing once we’d seen him. We only went near enough to see he was a goner. Then I run back to the house to tell Bennie to call the police, and Mr. Calverley waited by the door.”
“Had anyone seen Mr. Armiger since he came over here?” George looked at old Bennie, who was shivering in the background.
“Not that I know of, Mr. Felse. Nobody from the house has been across here. He never showed up after he took the champagne off the ice and walked off with it. I saw him go out of the side door. You know, Mr. Felse, you just come into the hall then yourself.”
“I know,” said George. “Any idea who this fellow was, the one to whom he wanted to show the ballroom? You didn’t see him?”
“No, he wasn’t with him when I saw him go out.”
“He made quite a point of not wanting to be disturbed?”
“Well, , , ” Bennie hesitated. “Mr. Armiger was in the habit of laying off very exact, if you know what I mean. I wa’n’t nothing out of the way this time.”
“Can you remember his exact words? Try. I’m interested in this appointment he had.”
“Well, I says to him, ‘Mr. Clayton’s ‘ere with the car.’ And he says: “Then he can damn’ well wait until I’m ready, if it’s midnight. I’m just going over to show a young pal of mine my ballroom, he’ll be right interested, he says, to see what you can do with a place like that, given the money and the enterprise, and I don’t want anybody butting in on us,’ he says, ‘I’ll be back when I’m good and ready, not before.’ .And then he goes.”
“But he didn’t sound upset or angry about it?” The words might have indicated otherwise in another man, but this was how Armiger habitually dealt with his troops.
“Oh, no, Mr. Felse, he was on top of the world. Well, like he was all evening, sir, you saw him yourself.”
“Odd he didn’t mention a name.”
“With that much money,” said Clayton in his flat, cool voice, “he could afford to be odd.”
“He was laughing like a drain,” said Bennie. “When he said that about showing off the ballroom he was fair hugging himself.”
“Somebody must have seen this other fellow,” said George. “We shall want to talk to all the rest of the staff, but I take it all those who don’t live on the premises have gone home long ago.” That would be the first job, once the body was handed over to the surgeon. “Any of the waiters living in, besides Ben?”
“Two,” said Calverley, “and two girls. They’re all up, I thought they might be needed, though I don’t suppose they know anything. My wife’s waiting up, too.”
“Good, we’ll let her get to bed as soon as we can.” He pricked his eras, catching the expected note of the cars turning in from the road. “That’s them. Go and switch the corner light on for them, Bennie, will you? And then I think you three might join the rest of the household inside.”
They withdrew thankfully; he felt the release of a quivering tension that made their first steps almost as nervous as leaps. Then the ambulance wagon came ponderously round into the yard, and Detective-Superintendent Duckett’s car impatiently shepherding it, and the machinery of the County C.I.D. flowed into the case of Alfred Armiger and took possession of it. It was a mark of the compulsive power of the deceased that the head of the C.I.D. had climbed out of his bed and come down in person at one o’clock in the morning. Only the murder of his own Chief Constable could have caused him greater consternation. He stood over the body, hunched in his greatcoat against the chill of the small hours and the hint of frost in the air, and scowled down at the deformed head which would never plan mergers or mischief again.
“This is a hell of a business, George. I tell you, my boy, when you came on the line and told me, I thought you’d gone daft or I had.”
“I felt much the same,” said George. “But there’s not much mistake about it, is there?”
Death, like its victim, had never been more positive. Superintendent Duckett viewed the setting, the body and the instrument, and said nothing until the doctor was kneeling over his subject, delicately handling the misshapen skull. Then he asked briefly, growling out of his collar: “How many blows?”
“Several. Can’t be sure yet, but six or seven at least. The last few possibly after he was already dead. Somebody meant business.” The doctor was youngish, ex-army, tough as teak, and loved his job. He handled Alfred Armiger with fascinated affection; nobody had cherished him like that while he was still alive.
“And I always thought it would be apoplexy,” said Duckett, “if it ever happened to him at all. How long’s he been dead?”
“Say half past eleven at the latest, might be earlier. Tell you better later on, but you won’t be far out if you consider, say, ten-fifteen to eleven-thirty as the operative period. And most of these blows were struck while he was lying right here, and I’d say lying still.”
“The first one put him out, in fact, and then whoever it was battered away at him like a lunatic to make sure he never came round again.”
“Not like a lunatic, no. Too concentrated and accurate. He was on target every time. But you could call them frenzied blows, they went on long after there was any need.”
“So it seems. Didn’t stop till the bottle broke. Marvel it didn’t break sooner, but glass plays queer tricks. George, on the details of this we sit, but firmly,” said Duckett heavily. “Dead, yes, of head injuries if we have to go that far, but keep the rest under wraps for the time being. I’ll issue a statement myself, refer the boys to me. And warn off those fellows who found him. We don’t want this released until I see my way ahead.”
“Very good,” said George. “I don’t think they’ll be wanting to talk about it, they’re too close to it for comfort. Can you make anything of that broken statuette?”
Duckett approached and stared at it, glumly frowning, then picked up its nearest neighbour, a couple locked in a tango death-grip. He grunted with surprise at its lightness, and turned it upside down to stare with disgust into its thin shell. “Sham as the rest of the set-up.” He put it back in its place and thumped the wall beneath it experimentally, but light as it was it sat sturdily on its broad base, and never even rocked. “Wouldn’t fall even if you crashed into the wall beside it, you’d have to knock the thing off bodily. No trace of anything else in the wreckage, nothing was thrown. No scratched paint. And anyhow, if it fell it would fall slightly outwards from the foot of the wall, this is right in the angle of the wall. May be dead irrelevant, may not. Get a record of it, Loder, while you’re about it. Not a hope of getting any prints off it, surface is too rough, but I suppose Johnson may as well try.” The photographer, circling Armiger’s body, murmured absorbed acquiescence, and went on shooting.
“And the champagne glasses,” said George.
“I saw them. You know whose prints will be on those, don’t you? Be a miracle if there are any others, unless it’s the maid’s who dried them and stacked them away here when they were unpacked. Still, we’ll see. Door, of course, Johnson, all the possible surfaces, baluster of that staircase. And that disgusting mess.” He indicated the magnum with a flick of his foot. “His own liquor turned traitor in the end.”
“Whoever was holding the neck of that,” said George, “must have been pretty well smeared. Blood all over it, right to the cork. His shoes and trousers may be spattered, too, though maybe not so obviously as to attract attention. I figure he was standing this side. He took care not to step in it. Not a trace between these marginal splashes and the door.”
“Well,” said Duckett, stirring discontentedly, “give me all you’ve got.”
George gave it, including his own accidental contact with Bennie during the evening.
“And those other two? What account have they given of their moves from ten o’clock on?”
“Clayton was sitting in the car out front when I left, which would be several minutes after ten. He says he moved the car into the yard about twenty past, as he saw no sign of Armiger coming back, and he was in the pub until closing-time, had one pint of mild, and that’s all. From half past ten until nearly eleven he hung around by the car. Still no boss. Then Calverley asked him to come into his own sitting-room, and he was there with Calverley and Mrs. Calverley all the time from then on. All three vouch for that. Bennie was clearing up in the bars with the other waiters, and k
eeping an eye open for Armiger returning, so that he could give Clayton the item. Around half past eleven Calverley and Clayton began to think they ought to investigate. They’re all used to doing what Armiger says and making no fuss about it, but they’d also be blamed if anything came unstuck and they didn’t deduce it by telepathy and come running, so whatever they did was pretty sure to be wrong, it was only a question of which was wronger, to butt in on him when he didn’t want them or to be missing when he did. I won’t say they were worried about him, but they were getting worried about their own positions with relation to him. Come midnight, they said to each other, better risk it. And they walked in solidly together and found him like this. The only period they don’t cover for each other is approximately half past ten to eleven, but I fancy you’ll find the indoor staff can account for Calverley for most of that time, too. Clayton could have moved around outside without being observed. I haven’t had time to see the others yet, but they’re waiting for me.”
“So many more months to shut,” said Duckett. “Those three will have spread the load by now.”
“You know, I doubt it. Don’t forget, this place only opened tonight, and all the staff except Bennie Blocksidge seem to have been brought into the district from all over. None of them knows the others yet. And when this drops on a bunch of strangers it’s just as likely to shut their mouths as open them. After all, somebody killed him, it might be the bloke sitting next to you.”
“Get on to ‘em, anyhow. When we finish here and take him away I’m leaving you holding it, George. Ring me early, and I’ll send you a relief.”
“I’ll stay with it all day,” said George firmly, “if it’s all the same to you.” He wanted to be sure of an undisturbed night rather than an uneasy and solitary sleep during the day. “Want me to contact Armiger’s solicitors, or will you do that?”
“Cui bono?” said Duckett absently. “I’ll get on to them myself. You make what you can of the bunch here, and I’ll send Grocott to help you with the day staff when they come in, and the list of people who were in the pub last night.”
