Margery Allingham's Mr Campion's Farewell

by Mike Ripley

  He had to pull himself together; this was ridiculous. All he was doing was crossing a road in a quaint country village, from the vicarage to the pub. It was just that he was doing it underground in passageways which had been used for two hundred years and the tamped-down dirt floors were not littered with the skeletons of sheep, or tourists, though many of both had passed this way. Had he not been told that parties of school children were shown around the passages in order to learn of their ancestors’ skill in ‘owling’? Was he really now just a frail old man frightened of the dark?

  He put his best foot forward – when in doubt, stick to the old maxims – and almost immediately felt the ground slope upwards. Another step confirmed his feet were not playing tricks on him and his torch showed that he had, without realising it, found the passage which led to the Carders’ Hall. Holding his left arm outstretched so that his fingertips brushed the cold but surprisingly dry surface of earth and flints, he strode on confidently, stooping slightly as the headroom decreased, until his torch illuminated a solid wooden door set in a solid wooden frame which completely blocked the passageway in front of him.

  Solid was definitely the word. This oak – if it was oak – had been firmly sported and there seemed no obvious mechanism for opening it from this side, which did not in itself surprise or disturb Campion. After all, the Carders meeting in full ritual session above would not have wanted their proceedings disturbed by owlers herding tax-free sheep pursued by irate Revenue Men. Perhaps the door was only opened on state occasions, or if it was raining and the Carders wanted to keep dry as they repaired to the Woolpack.

  Which reminded Campion that he had Don’s key to the passage door in the bar. Perhaps he should return it in spectacular fashion by bursting in and demanding to know why they were all talking about him. If nothing else, he might be able to eavesdrop on the Woolpack crowd just to see if he was still the subject of gossip. If he was not, and the locals were more concerned with the price of wool or hot under the collar about the cost of winter silage, then he would naturally be disappointed and would creep away into the night. Or rather, back into the dark of the empty subterranean maze.

  Except it was no longer empty and Campion was no longer alone down there.

  Before he saw or heard anything, he sensed a change in the still, earthy air and turned off his torch again, this time without hesitation. He was as blind as a mole and strained every fibre or muscle and nerve to prevent himself making any movement. He felt as one does in dream when the hole opens up in front of the dreamer, but there the fatal step off the edge usually jerks the sleeper awake. Mr Campion was not asleep; he was very awake and more conscious than ever that he was in a maze and would have to retrace his steps to the centre of it before finding any avenue of escape, assuming the Minotaur let him pass.

  In the complete darkness, he placed the torch into his right jacket pocket and adjusted the camera case so that it hung from his neck and rested on his chest, leaving both arms free to reach out to the sides of the passage. His hands would be his navigation aids and his stabilisers, but even so his first few steps down the gentle incline induced dizziness and a nausea he struggled to contain.

  When the palms of his hands told him that he had reached the end of the passage, he halted his shuffling gait. Before him, he knew, there was the wider space where all the passages converged, the place Lemmy Walker had called a ‘catacomb’ but Campion preferred to think of it in more mundane terms as a crossroads or a traffic roundabout. However he visualised it in his blindness, he knew he would have to switch on his torch now, or stay rooted to the spot quivering in the dark, before he could find an exit.

  He took the torch from his pocket and grasped it tightly but still hesitated before switching it on. Something prevented him from that small, life-enhancing action of pressing a tiny button and bringing light into his world of blackness. But those secondary senses which had advised caution were proved right even as his thumb wavered over the on button.

  From somewhere to his right – yes, it was definitely to his right – there came a thud, a distinct grunt and then a heavy footfall. As his eyes were of no use, Campion strained to listen for further sound and like and animal, sniffed the air. Yes, there was difference, a mustiness – a musk – which hadn’t been there before; and then there were more footsteps and a strange creaking wooden noise and then a very loud thump with a faint echo of – could it be? – tinkling glass. Whatever it was, it was near and all the more frightening when the noises stopped entirely and the darkness became silence once more.

  In his head, Campion counted to one hundred until he was convinced that whoever had been in front of him – and surely some human action must have been involved – had gone, retreating into one of the other passages. He dismissed the thought, which sprang unbidden into his favoured imagination, that a Minotaur would do exactly the same: hide in another part of the maze to lure his victim into the open.

  Taking a deep breath, Campion pushed his shaking right leg forward and flicked on the torch. The sight which met his blinking eyes made him exhale in surprise and stumble forward off balance. He brought himself to attention and sprayed the torch beam in an arc, still not quite believing what he saw.

  Less than ten feet from where he had been standing (hiding?), there had appeared on the tamped earth floor of the central ‘catacomb’ area where it was as out-of-place as a ‘No Spitting’ sign in the State Landau, a Humble Box, standing on its six wooden legs.

  Campion stared at it in the torchlight, its squat, spinet-like shape framed by dark shadows. Should he take a photograph of it? Otherwise, who would believe that a two-hundred-year-old piece of adequate carpentry but dubious scientific equipment (if indeed it was a genuine one) had suddenly materialised in a sheep smuggler’s tunnel. Perhaps it was a common enough occurrence when there was a full moon over Suffolk. Perhaps Campion should stop his mind from wandering and concentrate on why this ridiculous piece of furniture should have been placed where it had, in a central, unmissable position for anyone trying to navigate the passages.

  Did the Cretan Minotaur leave bait to entice and trap those brave enough to enter the maze? He would be able to ask the question out loud soon, for he could hear the Minotaur coming.

  ‘Was that what you were snooping for, Mr Nosey Parker?’ said the Minotaur in a rich Suffolk lilt.

  ‘I was hoping to see a Humble Box tonight – one recently arrived from the south of France in fact – but I didn’t expect it to come looking for me. However, when Mohammed can’t make it to the mountain, it is jolly decent of the mountain to pop underground,’ Campion chirped, slowly raising his torch.

  ‘Oi said you was off your bloody head, didn’t Oi?’ said the Minotaur.

  Campion focussed on the voice. It had come not from the vicarage passage, but from the next black hole along to the left as Campion stood, which would, if his mental map of Lindsay’s underground system was accurate, be the passage leading to and from the Humble Museum. To confirm his theory, the shadows in that passage shifted as the torch beam teased them. They shadows moved quickly, and were very large.

  Campion decided he would feel safer if he continued talking; a thesis his wife would never have supported.

  ‘Is this the Humble Box from the Museum or the one sent for repair by Lady Prunella? Or should that be Frau Berger? Lady Pru, bless her, probably has little idea what’s going on.’

  ‘You just love your snooping, don’t you?’ said the Minotaur from the darkness. ‘You loike stirring things up, and that ain’t roight. Not roight at all. You an’ that Ben Judd, you’re both troublers. Real stirrers you are, just like them stoodents last year, just like that schoolmaster, Walker.’

  ‘There have always been ‘troublers’, haven’t there, Clifford? It is Clifford, isn’t it?’ Campion’s question was met with total silence and his torch showed that the Minotaur had retreated out of its range. ‘Stirrers like Johnnie Sirrah and Austin Bonus.’

  There was a silence, a frighten
ingly long silence, before the Minotaur replied.

  ‘We took care of that Sirrah feller alroight. He didn’t make no more trouble.’

  ‘What are you saying, Clifford?’ Campion flashed the torch across the passage entrance. ‘You weren’t born when Johnnie Sirrah died. Your father couldn’t have been much more than a boy.’

  ‘He was twelve, he was, but he saw it all. Saw how Grandad Leonard settled his hash with a starting handle.’

  ‘I rather wish you hadn’t told me that, Clifford.’ Campion moved to his left trying to judge where the passageway to the Woolpack lay in the Stygian gloom, without taking the torch beam away from the Humble Museum passage, as light seemed to be the only thing which deterred the Minotaur.

  ‘You can’t touch me for it, nor my dad,’ said the voice in the dark. ‘Anyway, what you gonna do about it? We can keep you down here for nine days. That’ll cure you of being nosey, boy!’

  Campion stepped up to the Humble Box and ran his left hand over its wooden lid, whilst his eyes scanned the edges of the pool of torchlight to locate the passage which would lead to the Woolpack; or so he hoped.

  ‘Well before I’m cured of my curiosity, I might as well see the goods, mightn’t I?’ he called out to the figure in the dark. ‘This is how you bring them into the country, isn’t it? I understand that quite a lot of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide is now manufactured in Switzerland and Frau Berger is Swiss, is she not?’

  Campion lifted the wooden lid and lit up the interior with his torch. The flasks and vials, the scientific ‘guts’ of the box, were all full of liquid; a liquid which in no way aided in the forecasting of the weather.

  ‘This must be the most valuable Humble Box ever,’ said Campion. ‘I have no idea of the “street value” as I think it’s is called, but I am told that one ounce of LSD can make 30,000 doses when diluted and taken on sugar cubes or tiny squares of blotting paper. What happened, Clifford? Did you sell some undiluted Acid to get those students high last year? They weren’t used to such a concentration, were they? No one would be, it was eighty times stronger than usual – it was a lethal dose.’

  There was no answer from the Minotaur’s lair.

  ‘That’s a high price to pay for a high, Clifford. Too high.’

  Campion raised the torch and brought it down viciously into the workings of the Humble Box. He was rewarded with the satisfying sound of breaking glass; and almost immediately chilled to the marrow by a loud and angry scream as the Minotaur, head down, charged out of the dark towards him.

  Clifford Sherman was a bull of a man in daylight. In the dark, narrow tunnels of Lindsay Carfax, he was gargantuan – and he was frighteningly fast on his feet. Its beam swinging wildly as Campion used the torch as a club to wreck damage on the vials of liquid, made the whole scene appear as if it were the ragged end of a broken film running through a projector.

  Campion had no more than two seconds to take evasive action, which he spectacularly failed to do. Whether Clifford Sherman launched himself to attack Campion or to protect the Humble Box will never be known. Effectively he tackled both together with ham-sized fists flying, sending the older man crashing winded to the earthen floor and depositing his own considerable weight with considerable force on to the wooden box, which cracked loudly and crumpled under the impact. Campion saw little else, for as his back connected painfully with the ground, the torch flew out of his hand, bounced off a wall and went out, rolling away into the complete darkness.

  Flat on his back, Campion instinctively used his heels, shoulders and elbows to inch away from the wreckage of the Humble Box and his assailant, whose location he had no difficulty in gauging from the his heavy breathing and the crackling of wooden splinters and the tinkling of crushed glass as he attempted to stand up. If he stayed low – and he could not get much lower – and kept quiet, then he might, just might, be able to put a safe amount of darkness between himself and his attacker. The disadvantages to this plan were that he had no idea in which direction he was back-crawling, though as long as it was away from the sound of Clifford Sherman crunching wood and glass underfoot, it would be the right direction, and that he had no idea how long he could keep up the activity. He had taken a fist to the chest and the burning sensation he felt suggested that a rib could be cracked or broken, and when Sherman’s charge had knocked him off his feet, he had landed on his right thigh, inflaming the nerves and muscles so recently shot at then poked and prodded by doctors. But at least if he bit his lip and ignored the pain which came with every inch of ground covered, he could use the darkness to his advantage.

  ‘Oi bet Oi can see better in the dark than you can, old feller,’ said the Minotaur quietly.

  Campion froze, determined not to make a sound but straining to hear any which may give away his enemy’s proximity.

  ‘Oi’ve been crawling round these tunnels since I were a nipper. There ain’t no way you’s going to get by me.’

  Was the voice nearer? Feet away, or merely inches?

  ‘An’ you ain’t getting out, not now you’ve gone and smashed up the goods. They was worth a lot of money them goods, in places loike Cambridge an’ Lunnun.’

  Campion heard a piece of grass crack followed by a snort of pain. Perhaps the Minotaur was on all-fours and had injured a paw; when the monster had boasted about ‘crawling these tunnels’ had he perhaps been speaking literally?

  ‘Oi ain’t taking the blame for losing them goods. You’re going to answer for that, you old snooper.’

  Campion dug his elbows and heels into the ground and hauled himself away from the threats, making his escape in six-inch spurts. He was wriggling on his back like a frightened worm, but dignity was the least of his worries. He knew that if he tried to stand and run or even turn over on to his knees and crawl like a baby, the beast in the dark would hear his ancient bones slowly creak or somehow detect his movement, and then strike. At least on his back, he could see the coup de grâce coming … if only he had light.

  ‘You can’t get away, you old booger.’

  The Minotaur was so close now. Campion was sure he could smell him: a faint whiff of sweat, tobacco and motor oil and an underlying scent of poorly-washed woollen clothing. His enemy was very close, but at least he smelled human – and what was grasping at Campion’s ankle as he squirmed backwards was definitely a hand, not a paw or a claw.

  Campion kicked out with his left foot and felt a brushing contact with something; he could not tell what.

  ‘You’re a slippery old sod, ain’t yer? Well, Oi got all noight an’ you ain’t going nowhere.’

  The voice in the dark was sneering now and Campion sobbed silently in frustration. He was going to be hurt, possibly killed, down here in the black earth; put in a grave before the decency of death, scrabbling in the dirt to postpone the inevitable without even the satisfaction of looking his killer in the eye or spitting in his face. If only he had light!

  But he had; it was hanging around his neck trying to choke him.

  As he felt hands grabbing at his feet again, he used his own bruised and bloodied fingers to fumble open the camera case lying on his chest and remove the Olympus and its flash. By touch alone – and the luck of a desperate man – he slotted home the flash into its shoe fitting on top of the camera and flicked the on switch with a thumb. The normally faint electric whine of the flash unit charging up seemed to be amplified in the confines of the tunnels and it produced a loud grunt of surprise for the Minotaur, followed by an angry – and successful – grab for Campion’s right foot.

  ‘Got yer, grandad!’

  Campion was jerked along the passage floor, pain flashing up his right leg and thigh but worse pain followed immediately as a hammer blow from a clenched fist piled into his ribcage.

  Campion felt tears behind his useless spectacles and was sure that the next blow might see his end: a weak, frightened, old man crying in the dark and the dirt. Yet somehow he had kept hold of the Olympus and thrusting both arms straight out before him, he screwed
his eyes closed and pressed the shutter.

  Behind his wet eyelids he registered a red light as the flash fired. The effect on Clifford Sherman, who took the white light with eyes wide open at a range of only a few inches, was spectacular; he screamed in shock and released Campion’s foot to put both hands over his eyes.

  Campion, still blind but not blinded like his opponent, drew up his knees and shot out both feet in what he was sure would not be a recognised move in the French Savate school of street fighting. Nonetheless, the effect was satisfying as the soles of his shoes connected with some part – it did not matter which – of Clifford Sherman, who toppled away with a grunt and the sound of more glass being crushed under him.

  Now Campion rolled on to his right side and with considerable discomfort and an unnerving amount of swaying, pulled himself to his feet and thrust out an arm until he found a solid wall to lean against. He had no idea which wall of which passage it was, or where Clifford Sherman was, but he still held, miraculously, the Olympus and had automatically thumbed the wind-on mechanism to load the camera for another shot.

  Somehow he had managed to wound the Minotaur, judging by the gasps and grunts the animal was now emitting and though he knew himself to be close to fainting, he realised that the two of them could not remain in close proximity in that dungeon. He had a weapon, of sorts, and he had to use it. Aiming for the thrashing sounds Clifford was making, Campion held up his camera, averted his eyes, and pressed the shutter.

  His man-made lightning lit up a scene worthy of a Murnau piece of expressionism. Clifford Sherman was on his knees amidst the wreckage of the Humble Box, his huge fists twisting violently in his own eyes, his mouth open and emitting a low, animal howl of distress.

  Campion stepped away from the moaning beast, which was clearly wounded, though he could not work out how. But as wounded animals can still be dangerous, he thumbed the mechanism of the Olympus and flashed off three more lightning bolts as he moved away, keeping his back to the tunnel wall. He did not know or care which direction he was moving, only that it was away from Clifford, for the flashes bouncing off the passage sides and roof, had disorientated him as much as his victim. It was only at the third flash that he registered that his victim was no longer where he had been.