by Gerald Kersh
“Well, yes, you did,” I said; and my heart bled for that lovesick funny man. . . .
There was silence after Charlie Wood’s confession to the killing. A silence that left us all a little embarrassed. The girls got ready for the weeping act they’d seen on the films. I cursed, inaudibly but with bitterness.
Playing a theatre in a one-eyed wilderness like Groombridge Junction with a seventh-rate concert party was bad enough: to be dragged to the theatre on an empty stomach to attend an inquiry into the murder of one’s leading lady was plumbing the depths.
There is a limit to everything.
One of us was guilty.
Charlie wanted the honours.
We all goggled a bit as we waited for him to justify his outburst.
He did it well . . . emotion flooded out like Groombridge rain.
The women didn’t know whether to weep or faint—I pictured the whole scene re-enacted at the Old Bailey.
“Go on, Charlie,” I said. “Go on, Charlie . . .”
“So,” said Charlie Wood, “I was passing the boys’ room, and the door was open, so I looked in. I saw the knife on Joe’s trunk and put it in my pocket. I left among the first last night, and waited for Ruby to come out.”
“And then?” said the detective-inspector. “You simply stabbed her in the back?”
“Yes.”
Everybody gasped. I remember saying: “What a mug you turned out to be!” Then the detective-inspector took a pencil out of his pocket. I thought he was going to take notes. Instead, he handed the pencil to Charlie Wood.
“Show me how you did it.”
Wood seized the pencil in his red right fist, and inflicted a terrible backhanded stab on the empty air. Two or three people standing near him leapt out of the way.
At this point, Vernon, the man who guards the stage door, raised a piping voice.
“Yer couldn’t of taken that knife orf that trunk. I took it orf the trunk and put it on the table. I went up to the musicians’ dressing-room, because I ’ad to take Mister Wollymire’s——”
“Wladimir!” snapped the old violinist.
“—I ’ad to take ’im up a pot o’ tea for one. I put the tray on the trunk, an’ I took the knife off the trunk, see? I put that knife on the table.”
“Anyway, I picked it up,” said Charlie Wood.
“Why didn’t you mention that before?” asked the detective-inspector, turning to Vernon.
Vernon looked sullen; like so many people vaguely connected with the theatrical business, he is a bit mad. He was a juggler until he took to drink; then he missed things, scattered glass balls in the auditorium, and so went to the dogs. He never could have been any good, anyway. He is an absolute fool.
“I forgot,” he said.
I told him that he was an imbecile. Vernon shrugged. The detective-inspector spoke to Charlie Wood again: “And then you walked up behind the lady and stabbed her in the back?”
“Yes.” Charlie Wood lit a cigarette.
“All right,” said the detective-inspector. “But she wasn’t stabbed in the manner you demonstrated.”
“Oh, hell!” said Wood. “How should I remember just how I held the knife? I stabbed Ruby Tinto in the back, and leave it at that.”
“Right,” said the detective-inspector, and beckoned to a man with heavy shoes.
Helena Fay screamed. “Wait! Don’t! He’s only saying that to shield me. Can’t you see that? It was me. I killed her. I was jealous. I thought she was trying to take Charlie away from me. I saw the knife on Joe’s table and put it in my bag——”
“For God’s sake take me away,” said Charlie Wood. “Isn’t it obvious she’s lying to cover me up?”
“I’m not!”
“If you two are so much in love with each other,” said the detective-inspector, “does either of you see the other home?” He tapped Vernon on the arm. “Did these two go out together?”
“No,” said Vernon, “ ’e went last. She went first. I stayed be’ind for a bit.”
“I said I had to have a drink with a fellow,” said Wood. “I finished Ruby first. Then nipped along to the ‘Red Lion’ just before closing time.”
“I waited on the corner of the theatre until Ruby came out,” said Helena. “Then I came up behind her and stabbed her. And I’d do it again! I’d do it again!”
The detective-inspector sighed. “Neither of you know where you found the knife. Neither of you know how you held the knife. And you both stabbed Ruby Tinto in the back, from behind. Well, as a matter of fact, she wasn’t stabbed from behind. Nor was she stabbed in the back.”
And then something incredible happened.
Big Marco stepped forward holding out his hands. I shall never forget the amazement with which I looked at those mighty, hairy fists, held close together. “Take me,” he said. “It was me who done dis. I tell Yonnie Yerkson last night I am goink to cut her troat . . .” He swore a tremendous Scandinavian oath which sounds like thunder but, I think, merely means: By the big Japanese trumpeter who blows ballads. “An’ I kill her. I was yoost a little mad. She make me for a fool. She lead me up dem garden. Dan she laugh. She make me fall in lof vit her. Dan she tell me she lof my brodda.”
Little Marco’s face was wet with tears. He threw an arm about his brother’s ox-like back and said: “No, Ib! Ib, you fool! Hey, you! You copper! Look!” He thrust a hand under his coat. Big Marco wheeled, throwing out a fist like a bung-starter. It would have knocked a buffalo off its feet. Little Marco went down with a crash, in a cloud of dust.
“I am sorry, Olaf,” said Big Marco. But the little one was already rising from the floor. His hand came out from under his waistcoat, with a bundle of cards and papers. “Look,” he said, and threw the bundle to the detective-inspector.
I looked over his shoulder as he tore away the elastic band. The bundle consisted of Press cuttings and photographs. “Gaucho, the Hatchet King,” said the caption, and above it stood Little Marco, in South American costume, with a shining chopper poised in each hand. Beyond him, strapped to a board, leaned a handsome blonde, outlined in a murderous-looking bristle of axes, knives, and swords.
“That is me,” said Little Marco. “I used to be a knife-thrower. I am still good. But once there was a scandal; in Australia. I nearly killed a partner. So I joined Ib in his act. I quarrelled with Ruby. She should have been my girl. But she loved Ib better. I am only a little runt. I said to her: ‘If I don’t have you, nobody will.’ She drove me mad. I picked up Johnnie’s knife, the prop knife. I can throw anything with a point on it. I am still good. I went out and waited, just a few seconds, because I knew she was coming. There was nobody else in the street just then. I could just see her in the dark; she carried a little torch. I threw the knife and saw her fall. Then I walked on and caught up with Ib. And then he says he did it—to save me!”
“Idiot!” said Big Marco. “I wish I smack you stone blasted cold before you say dat, little fool!”
“My God,” I said. “I’m sorry about this. Little Marco, you stupid——”
“You dunt call him no names,” said Big Marco, “dat little lousy mug.”
“Let’s go,” said Little Marco.
“Then,” said the detective-inspector, “I suppose your real name is Hugo Brenner?”
“My real name is Olaf Ibsen,” said Little Marco.
“Yet you were Ruby’s boy-friend?”
“She made me think so.”
“Hm,” said the detective-inspector. “Well, I suppose we’d better take you along, Mr. Ibsen.”
We all followed them. In the passage the detective-inspector paused to glance at the notice-board. “Hard luck on these people,” he said, pointing to a quarto sheet. It said: . . . I forget the exact words: it said that all the boys and girls in Johnnie Jackson’s Follies would have to consider themselves sacked as from such-and-such a date.
“Yes, tough,” I replied.
The detective-inspector took out a wallet, and produced a sheet of blue paper. He loo
ked at it, and then at me.
“You are Hugo Brenner,” he said.
“I am Johnnie Jackson,” I replied.
“That makes no difference,” he said. “There’s just one or two points . . .” He spoke, as it were, to himself: in a half-audible monotone.
“Now that I come to think of it, the girl couldn’t have been killed by a knife thrown as this fellow describes. The stab was almost vertical. It went into the neck where it joins the shoulder, and right down into the lungs. It cut the big artery. It went in up to the hilt. You’d have to throw a knife almost straight up into the air for it to land like that, and then it would be impossible to hit a moving target in a black-out, even if it was carrying a torch. That was an overhand stab, by somebody standing directly facing her. And again, she was found in a shop front. Whoever killed her went over her bag. Not for money, because her purse was untouched.”
“The poor girl only made a fiver a week,” I said.
“Yes. There you are. Yet somebody wanted something in her bag. What? Papers, letters? Now in her bag there was a kind of extra pocket in the lining, with a packet of letters, all signed ‘Hugo Brenner’, or ‘Hugo’, and quite obviously written by her husband.”
“What!”
“Her husband. She appears to have married Hugo Brenner. Now, Mr. Jackson, I happened to see that notice there, and I recognised the writing.” He stood in front of me, blocking the passage. “You are Hugo Brenner.”
“I am John Jackson,” I said, “and you are haywire. Let me see that letter.”
He held it before my eyes. “What, me write like that?” I said: “I am no illiterate, my friend, even though I may run a small-time pierrot show. I . . .”
I read the letter. Something inside me turned over. I felt—how shall I put it?—as water must feel when it is congealing into ice. Something behind my eyes seemed to swell and strain to bursting point. I felt that I had suddenly dropped a mile in empty space, leaving my heart and stomach above me.
I shrieked: “These letters are dated 1933!”
“Yes.”
The thing behind my eyes burst. I was suddenly drenched in perspiration. I heard Helena say: “He’s laughing,” and so I was.
“Then she was a bigamist,” I said. “I didn’t marry her until 1935. I needn’t have paid her money all these years. I could have married Joy. I needn’t have killed her at all.” I roared with laughter. “I could even have blackmailed her.”
If I could have bitten my tongue out before I said all that, I should be in my own comfortable bed by this time, looking forward to another dawn.
But it will all be the same a hundred years hence.
Did I say years? Days. Did I say a hundred? One. I hang to-morrow.
Red Gentleman of Staffordshire
I saw Gavin Eld twelve weeks after he got back. He used to have the kind of head a five-year-old child could portray in ten seconds—a jug-handled lop-sided oval enclosing a couple of arches over a pair of dots, representing eyes and brows; an O for a nose and an almost straight line intended to be a mouth. But in the eleven months of his absence something had been at work on his chalky sketch of a face: in one or two great strokes it had been marked with a power, a calm, and a certain dignity. It takes anguish to do that. Pain strengthens the face as weightlifting strengthens the body . . . provided you do not compel yourself to carry more than you were made to bear. Yes, some master hand had shaded him, giving him weight and depth. And something else had tried to deface him. His forehead and left cheek were scribbled over with scars. Eld still grinned his rabbit-tooth grin, but in a lop-sided way, and behind his eyes, which had been expressionless as the grey glass marbles that used to cork lemonade bottles when the world was young, there was a strange shadow. Suffering had thinned him. His skin looked burnt, and hung loose: he walked with a sort of wolfish lope.
Mine was the only face he knew when he came into camp. He had little enough to say . . . that he had been captured at Louvain but got away. For forty weeks Gavin Eld had been on the run in dangerous territory, eating and sleeping like a hunted beast in gulps and snatches under hedges and in shadowy doorways. About Eld’s headlong assault against a thousand miles of fantastic distance, there was something crazy and wonderful: It had the madness and the grandeur of the charge of Bohemund’s God-intoxicated men at Antioch. Hopelessly lost, quite alone on the gloomy plains of France, he had walked home. He was convinced that the war was lost. He wanted to get back to die. France and Belgium had slid into the depths like shale off a cliff. Eld found himself stumbling in the débris of a great grey ruin. He knew that he had travelled eastwards, so he walked westwards.
I asked him: “What did you eat?”
He said: “What I could get.”
“Where did you sleep?”
“Where I lay down.”
They gave him a Military Medal. He drew twenty-five pounds of back pay. One week, or fifteen pounds later, I saw him in a cocktail-bar in Woking. He was sitting on a red leather stool sipping mild ale. Next to him sat a sulphur-headed woman in slacks holding a lead attached to a bull-terrier. Eld was staring at this dog with gloomy eyes. When he saw me he said, in an audible whisper, jerking a careless thumb: “Great fat cowardly bitch.”
The woman said: “I beg your pardon?”
Eld said: “I mean yon dog, lady, not thee. She’ll weigh forty-eight pounds, give or take a pound?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure.”
Eld said: “I lay five pounds she’s fast.”
“Fast?”
“Ay . . . fast to come, fast to go. If she was mine I’d put her in sack wi’ a stone, and chuck her in t’ Cut.”
“Oh you would, would you?”
“Lady,” said Eld, “I know dogs. It was me as owned Skylarks. That’s foreign for Tearer.”
“Scylax,” I said.
“Ay, Tearer by name, tearer by nature. Bitches’ choice, and the greatest dog ever pupped.”
“Greyhound?” asked the sulphur-headed blonde.
“No, lady, a pit-dog.”
“A pit-dog? I’ve heard of pit-ponies——”
“Lady,” said Gavin Eld, “a Staffordshire bull-terrier, lady, a fighting dog, lady, a killer. The greatest battler that ever breathed, a red dog, a real Staffordshire bull, a pit-dog, a proper gentleman of Staffordshire.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”
“A fighting dog, lady, a thirty-pound fighter. He could kill anything God stood on four legs, or know the reason why. He saved me twice.”
I believe that Gavin Eld must have drunk a lot of mild ale. He was never a talker. But he talked now. We edged away from the bar and sat at a table. I remember that the woman in slacks came with us, followed by her great square-chested bull-terrier. Eld felt its neck and sneered. “Skylarks would have taken her guts out in seven minutes,” he said. “That was a dog. That was a dog of the old fighting breed. You or I, Gerald, couldn’t wish to have a better father and mother. And he saved me twice.”
Then he told us. I shall not try to reproduce his strange, ugly nasal-throaty accent. Once in a while he dropped into slang. The blonde stared at him, fascinated. I did too. He began to talk about fighting dogs; and as he talked I swear to you that there crept into my nostrils a strange, acrid smell of dogs and beer and tobacco-smoke and the small hours . . . I seemed to see a public-house parlour in the Midlands. . . . Men were waiting: leather-faced men with clamped mouths, eleven or twelve of them; and about six dogs . . . little dogs, with a certain viperish triangularity of head, a doggedness of jaw, a peculiar width between the eyes. I tell you that I saw it and I smelt it. Perhaps you associate the dog-fight with ancient history. But dogs still fight: the ancient breed of the fighting dog is still maintained; the descendants of the crop-eared bear-baiters are still bred—terrible dogs, good for nothing but mortal combat, but shockingly good for that. They mate them, still, in the north of England and the Midlands: Staffordshire terriers that would rather fight than eat. I had often w
ondered what Gavin Eld had done for his living. In that absurd cocktail-bar as he sat with the sulphur-blonde on his left hand and me on his right, he seemed to peel himself off. He stripped off his present life like a plaster.
He talked:
Skylarks was a great dog. His father was great, and his mother was a great bitch. You don’t know the Staffordshire bull. He is a wonderful dog. It’s an instinct of women, and other she-animals, to protect the weakest of a litter. (Haven’t you seen how a woman will stand by a humpy-backed child?) But a Staffordshire bitch will choose, always, the finest fighting dog of the litter. You called him Scylax. I meant to call him that, but I never had your education. I called him Skylarks. He was a great dog—ginger as a chorus-girl, cobby, balanced like scales and—so to speak—almost hanging in mid-air. He was a great fighter, and he saved me twice.
I dare say you know that I get my living, when I get my living, out of dogs. I keep ’em and I breed ’em. I breed only fighters and killers. I have had one dog that got me £350 a year for two years. He was killed. He was a Staffordshire bull and it was a Staffordshire bull that killed him: his throat was torn out after a fight that lasted one hour and forty-eight minutes. I had Skylarks’ mother for a long time. Skylarks was out of her by Ripper. They were red and he was red—a very red dog indeed, ginger as they come. You know, I dare say, how you train one of them bulls . . . you wear heavy boots and kick them, toe up. No need to go into details. I will tell you all you want to know: only two things are needed to train a Staffordshire bull—heavy nailed boots and a steel bar. They don’t feel nothing else.
I trained Skylarks for fighting. When he was a mere puppy I chucked him in a fighting mongrel, and watched Skylarks kill him and take out his liver and eat it. Soon, I lived on that dog. I can’t tell you what he looked like: I can only tell you some points. Give or take a pound, he weighed thirty pounds and was red. He had a head like a coal-scuttle, a little tiny tail and a stocky body. As it so happened, he was born with cropped ears. I have not known this to happen before. His ears needed no crop. Everything that you can imagine in the way of fight, all that you ever thought of in the way of guts and courage was in that dog. At three months he would have fought a lion. I trained him, I trained him as I never trained a dog in my life before or since. Ah! Nothing in the world, lady, nothing in the world, Gerald, can come up to a good Staffordshire bull—a good pit-dog of breed. There’s blood there! Give me blood! Against all the world, give me breed and blood; because if you produce a little naked rat that’s got blood and breed, he’ll fight, although his soul is bigger than his body.
