by Bruce, Leo
Instead of walking straight in through the normal front entrance of the tent, I lifted the side wall and slipped in under it. I was behind the tier of seats, but as I glanced between the boards I saw Jackson enter the ring and walk across it. For some reason I did not move or attempt to attract his attention, but stood perfectly still and watched him. He seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts, and his eyes never raised themselves from the ground just in front of his feet. When he reached the edge of the ring he bent down and hauled at the wire support of Daroga’s wire-walking apparatus, walking backwards and so pulling it roughly into the correct position across the side of the ring. Then he fastened the end he had been holding loosely to one of the quarter-poles and began to examine the tightening screw half-way up the wire.
I began to feel slightly embarrassed in case he should glance up and see me. I was not hidden by the planks of the seating, and should he happen to turn his eyes in my direction he was bound to notice me. But I dared not move. As far as I could see, there appeared to be nothing suspicious about his action so far, and yet I had a feeling that it would be better somehow not to be discovered spying on him.
After a few minutes, apparently satisfied with his scrutiny, he returned the apparatus to its normal position between acts, and quickly left the tent. I waited a little while until he should get clear, and then left by the way I had entered, and went to find Beef to tell him what I had just witnessed.
Beef, however, as usual, was unimpressed when I told him.
“That’s right,” he said. “As ring-master he’s supposed to inspect all the apparatus before it’s used.”
“Perhaps so,” I said a little damped, “but not necessarily at this time of the day. There’s another three or four hours to the afternoon performance, so why was he sneaking around in there just now?”
“Shouldn’t think there’s very much in that,” commented Beef. “Perhaps he wanted to save a bit of time, or perhaps it just struck him that something might be getting a bit worn somewhere. You know how, when you think of a thing, it’s best to go and do it straight away. Perhaps …”
“Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps,” I said, with exasperation. “It doesn’t strike me that’s a very good foundation on which to base one’s investigation into a murder.”
Beef grinned at me. “No, it isn’t much of a way of doing things, is it?” he said, and shrugged his shoulders. “But there you are.”
Beef in this sort of mood infuriated me, and I walked to the window in an attempt to conceal my feelings. A long black car was driving through the gate of the tober, and after stopping by one of the hands who was apparently giving information, it moved on toward Kurt’s wagon.
“Here’s the doctor, anyway,” I told Beef, with a sense of relief, and he immediately jumped to his feet.
“Nice car,” he commented, glancing out of the window. “Does well for himself. Come on, let’s hear what he’s got to say.”
Actually the doctor had very little to say. There was no doubt that Kurt was ill, but the doctor seemed to think that it was nothing more than a slight breakdown. Kurt had been overworking for some time. On no account, the doctor said, must Kurt get up or do anything energetic for three or four days.
“If you can,” he went on, “stay in bed for a week. But I know you people. You’ll be up long before you should and working as usual. With a constitution like yours, of course, that’s not very serious. But take my advice and rest as long as you can. If anything further develops, let me know straight away.”
To Beef and me privately he confessed that he could not tell for sure whether the breakdown might not have been brought on by some sort of poisoning. But he doubted anything so romantic, and seemed to think the Sergeant was trying to pull his leg. He was a very prosaic little man and his imagination fitted his stature. Beef watched him walk fussily away, and then gave me a grin.
“I bet he was the sort of boy,” he said, “that never read Sexton Blake because it was too ‘far-fetched.’ Just shows you, doesn’t it?”
Beef did a great deal of writing and pondering in the wagon that night. He would sit in his chair staring blankly at the wall for long periods, and then suddenly grin at me. After one of these long periods of intense thought I could stand it no longer.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“What, just then?” he said. “Well, I was just wondering what would happen to my window-boxes. I told Mrs. Beef to give them a look over now and again to see they was doing all right. But I bet she forgets all about them. Wouldn’t like anything to happen to them.”
“Great heavens!” I exclaimed, “I thought you were working on the case.”
“Oh, you don’t want to get yourself worried over that,” said Beef comfortingly.
“Do you think you know everything now?” I asked eagerly.
Beef grinned boyishly. “I’m going to arrest Cora Frances tomorrow,” he said.
“Cora Frances!” I gasped, with amazement. “Do you mean that …” And then something in the Sergeant’s eye made me realize that I was having my leg pulled. “Beef, you’re impossible,” I said.
“That’s what the missus says,” agreed Beef.
At last I could stand it no longer and left the wagon. The last sound I heard as I closed the door behind me was Beef’s derisive chuckle. The evening show had nearly finished, so I waited about the grounds until the people had crowded out and the big top began to come down.
I saw Ginger and Tug Wilson talking together, and wandered slowly across to them. They did not notice my approach, and I heard a few scraps of their conversation before I reached them.
“And that Bogli’s Circus,” Ginger was saying, “been trailing along after us for the last three or four days. Do you know they’re going to be in the next village to us tomorrow?”
“Looking forward to another barney with them?” asked Tug.
“I reckon we’ve got enough on our hands without them,” replied Ginger. “This circus is no bed of roses.”
Tug leaned forward and put his hand on Ginger’s sleeve. His face, turned sideways to me, was deeply shadowed and the hump on his back seemed to stand out more than usual against the canvas of the zoo behind them. “You want to remember one thing, though,” he said.
“What’s that?” asked Ginger.
“The ghost walks tomorrow night,” answered Tug.
At this moment they both looked up and noticed me approaching and stopped their conversation immediately. We talked for a few minutes rather inconsequentially, and I left them as quickly as I could to return to the wagon.
“Here,” I said as I burst into the wagon, “I just heard something very queer.”
“Shut the door,” said Beef, who was undressing for bed. “I’m not a peep-show.”
I told him what I had heard pass between Tug Wilson and Ginger.
“The ghost walks, does it?” said Beef, struggling into his pajamas. “Well, I hope it keeps fine for it.”
“Now, Beef,” I began. But the Sergeant pulled the covers over his head and appeared to be paying no attention. “Good night,” came his muffled voice from under the blankets.
CHAPTER XXVIII
May 2nd (continued).
As I commenced slowly to undress I thought briefly over the part I had so far played in this case. Surely I had done all that could be expected of an investigator’s chronicler? I could think of no time when I had not lived up to my traditional role, nothing I had left undone which I ought to have done, or done that which I ought not to have done. At times had I not been the abject fool? I had asked all the right questions, showed excitement over every single piece of evidence, no doubt missing all that was really important; I had allowed Beef to snub every suggestion I had made, and yet shown no rancor or bitterness in reporting his suggestions. I had even, I thought mournfully, attempted to provide “interest” with what I was still not sure was not a real love-affair with Anita. Now, traditionally again, all that was left to me was to wait patien
tly for Beef to clarify the puzzle. The Sergeant appeared to have made up his mind.
But, I thought suddenly, if Beef had made up his mind, why should not I make up mine? There was nothing revolutionary in a chronicler having a theory. But why, for once, should not the chronicler’s theory be correct? With this resolution I drew out paper and pen and ink, turned the lamp higher, and sat down at the table.
In the first place it seemed to me that if there was to be an attempt at murder in the circus, it must occur on the next day. Not only because Gypsy Margot had given a time limit in her prediction, and tomorrow was the last day of that period, but for other more immediate reasons. Tomorrow was the Jubilee performance. The circus had been running for twenty-five years, and this was, in a sense, a personal celebration of the artists. But it was still a public show, and because of the unusual feeling in the show about the importance of the event, I realized that all the artists would be keyed up for the performance. It should have been the best show the circus had ever given, we had been told, but so also, it might be the most tragic. An intending murderer could scarcely choose a time when the circus folk’s attention would be less acute, less likely to notice small irregularities. And this gave the murderer the biggest chance of getting away with it.
I proceeded to run through the circus people, trying to assess them, and take into consideration all that we had learned of them since we had been with the show. Somewhere among them, we had to suppose, was a murderer, and somewhere was a person on whose life there was going to be an attempt. Only tomorrow’s show would tell us for sure which of them fitted into these roles.
I felt as I wrote that there was something unreal about considering people as possible murderers, but that was the only possible way of producing a case.
Jackson was obviously the man to begin with. That cold, cynical face was like a mask on the real man, a mask which looked at the circus he was running as if it were no more than some halfpenny peep-show. Did he really think all people were fools? Or was it some inadequacy in him which required cynicism and sarcasm as a defense against a world a little too big for him? In this particular case, I felt, it was the characters themselves which were the clues, and their actions, thoughts, behavior, which made up the evidence. It was as important to decide what sort of a man Jackson really was, as to discover why he had been so agitated about the button Beef discovered in his wagon.
The button seemed, in some way, to link him with the wire-walker. Of all the people in the circus there was only Daroga who was not afraid of the proprietor. Even Corinne, with her defiance and ostentatious selfishness, was nervous with her father. She lost, as everybody else did in his presence, her self-complacent scorn for anything outside herself. Mrs. Jackson had shown her own feelings only too clearly on that day when Anita had been stabbed; she had scuttled back to the wagon to get her husband’s supper not in the way some wives do—to keep peace in the house—but because of Jackson himself. Eric, perhaps, was harder to understand. He seemed to keep well out of his father’s way as much as possible, but whether from fear or because he simply disliked trouble was difficult to decide. And yet Daroga, in every meeting between the two, had shown complete self-confidence. What was there between the two men which always gave Daroga the whip hand? When the circus had pitched into the wrong tober it had been Jackson who scurried off to change the booking with the landlord. When there had been trouble over a new elephant-man, it had been Daroga who triumphed, and the man still worked in the show, despite Jackson’s obvious disapproval.
Was Jackson the sort of man who could stand this belittling of his dignity? And if he could not, what would his action be? It seemed fairly clear that he was being blackmailed by the wire-walker; it was almost certain that Daroga knew something about Jackson which the proprietor wished to keep quiet. Suppose the way he chose out of this difficulty were the way of murder. There had been the small incident in the empty tent when I had watched Jackson inspecting the wire-walking apparatus. Perhaps that had its significance here. But if Jackson were in some way to make the apparatus unsafe, surely there was little chance of his doing more than disabling Daroga? There could be no point in that. Daroga must have had many accidents on the wire in his time. They were often serious enough, though never likely to prove fatal. But perhaps there was some way Jackson has discovered of making the wire a death-trap; some way which Daroga would not be able to foresee.
Before leaving Jackson I tried to think for a moment if there was anybody else he might possibly kill. Gypsy Margot seemed to be trying to break up the show; at least, we had Jackson’s own word that he suspected her of that. Might he not try to murder her in an attempt to stop her influence over the others? There was even a third possibility. Jackson might be nothing more than the traditional father jealous of his daughter’s honor. If it seemed to him likely that Corinne would compromise herself with young Torrant, and so leave the show, would Jackson stop at mere words in order to prevent it? Of course, looked at coldly, this made the whole thing appear fantastic, but I had to start with the supposition of murder in order to draw up something of a case, so that I must face even the most fanciful of possibilities.
One of the only factual clues we had been lucky enough to find had been the button picked up by Beef in the proprietor’s wagon. Did that in some way link Jackson with Daroga? The proprietor had claimed the button as his own, and yet the wording on it had been in Russian, from which country the wire-walker had originally come. How did it fit into the relationship between the two men, and what part was it likely to play in tomorrow’s show? It might possibly be the clue on which many things hung.
Of Daroga himself we seemed to know even less than we knew about Jackson. Quiet, experienced, apparently well-liked by the rest of the artists, he had the sort of frank, open manner which only left one more intrigued. Born in Russia, he had lived the life of an exile since his earliest infancy. In that life there must have been much suffering, hunger, occasionally, perhaps, fits of desperation against circumstances which had been inexplicably harder for him than for others. One could imagine such a life souring a man, making him hate the rest of humanity. But Daroga, if he hated anyone at all, appeared only to hate Jackson. And in this there seemed to be more contempt than real hatred. If, as we suspected, Daroga was blackmailing the proprietor, what had he to gain by murdering him? A blackmailer seldom murders his victim. And besides, there had been no incident which pointed to this desire. But on the other hand, it must be remembered that Daroga was in charge of the elephants, one of which had already attempted to kill a man. These animals could be made to do very curious things, as we had seen in the incident when Albert Stiles had been ducked in the village pond. Could Daroga have some scheme in which the elephants themselves played the part of murderers? Jackson was the ring-master and had to be present during the elephant act. There seemed to be no other person against whom Daroga bore the slightest animosity.
If one were looking for people with a grouch against the world there was no better example in the show than Peter Ansell. His cynicism was far more deep-rooted than Jackson’s because it had behind it a kind of developed philosophic anarchism. He was more impersonal in his dislike of people. It seemed that it was not so much that they had done wrong to him, or given him a too slender chance in life, as that they were ant-like and remote. I did not agree with his conclusions in the least, but I could appreciate his detachment.
The only part he played in the life of the circus was in his love for Corinne, but we had no knowledge of how strong that love could be. He had shown no jealousy as far as I had noticed, but he might have been given no cause yet. He had, moreover, been one of the five present when the tiger had escaped. Had he been the one responsible for that incident? And if so, what had been the intention behind it? During the actual performance, however, he did not appear in the ring and it was difficult to foresee what action he could take. It was clear that the only motive he might have would be centered in Corinne. He disliked the circus and would not
be worried at leaving it. In fact, he probably would have done so before now had it not been for Corinne Jackson.
But Corinne herself wanted to be free of the circus. Anita had told us this, and it was easily visible in the girl’s manner. When she appeared in the ring it was with an air that she was conferring benefits on an audience who should be overjoyed by her condescension. She had, as they say, other ideas, and those ideas were concentrated outside the influence of the sawdust ring. She would never be content to follow the age-old traditions of circus families, training their children to continue with the act or start out with new ones. She might not be happy away from the circus, but there was no doubt that she wanted to get away. These affairs she had with young men were only one aspect of this desire. From what Herbert Torrant had said to Beef, it did not seem that she looked to any of these ephemeral suitors as an actual means of leaving the circus, but each of them did show where her sympathies lay. And yet when she was performing in the ring she seemed to be a different person altogether. I remembered once, as she rode round the ring, watching her face. She was doing a turn I had never seen before—an equestrian act which had replaced the Concinis for a while after the stabbing affair. She did not seem to notice the audience very much, but it was not the scornful disregard of her normal appearances. It was rather as if she had been caught up in the act and was thrilled by it. She and the horse performed perfectly together, as if through long habit. Yet I had never seen her rehearsing the act at any time. She was a very clever and daring rider. Why did she only show the horses and the absurd Eustace? It seemed that she was consciously limiting her part in the show as a gesture of her dislike. No other theory could reconcile her obvious enjoyment of the riding act, and the fact that normally she never rode for the show.
