The Beckoning Lady

by Margery Allingham

  The office had all the orderly charm of a dentist’s surgery. The window looked on to the stable wall, and green filing cabinets lined every available space. The desk supporting the covered typewriter was in the centre of the rug, and the rug was in the centre of the floor. The note addressed to S. S. Smith Esquire was in the centre of the mantelpiece, and there was another addressed to an R. Robinson Esquire beneath it. But these were the only items which could conceivably have been called personal. In the entire room there was nothing intimate, not a cigarette-box, not a flower vase, not a tea-cup.

  Mr. Campion looked at the filing cabinets. Each drawer was labelled and he let his eye run over them casually. Architect. Contractor. Builder. Demolition Merchant. Miss Pinkerton had been busy.

  He was turning away when a label marked Findahome caught his eye and he pulled open the drawer behind it. The size of the file surprised him. It was three inches thick. But he was even more astonished by the fact that it was tied up with tape like a parcel and was marked “Correspondence: proposed purchase Beckoning Lady”. Underneath in much fresher ink was the single unequivocal word “Finished”, followed by a date, “June 15th”, which was becoming memorable to him as the one on which Little Doom must have died.

  He was considering just how unethical it would be to open the parcel forthwith when the problem was settled for him promptly by the sound of voices in the front of the house. He closed the drawer softly, raised the window sash and slid quietly out into the narrow way. When he emerged round the side of the house, the first person he saw was Tonker Cassands, looking solid and doggy in tweeds only a little darker than his sandy hair. There were three men on the drive, Luke, Tonker and a hatless young giant who was looking at the house with the same blankness with which Mr. Campion himself had greeted it. Beside them was a small and dusty car marked Press on the windscreen.

  Reflecting that the modern fashion for labels ought to make life elementary, Mr. Campion advanced upon the party and reached it just in time to catch Tonker’s closing remark.

  “I’ll leave you here then, George,” he was saying. “You’re certainly the first.” He turned to Luke as to a friend. “If, as you say, the gardener thinks the old cook is coming home on the Sweethearting bus, she’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Do you want to see her, or can I get a lift back to the village from you? If not, I can cut across the fields.”

  “No, I’ll take you.” Luke was grinning slightly.

  “Splendid fellow,” Tonker sounded unconcernedly pleased. “Well George, as soon as you’re through, look us up. Minnie will be delighted. Anyone will tell you the way.” He returned to Luke. “Since you say you can’t tell this chap much now, where will he find you? At the Mill? Good. Well well, that’s settled. Hullo Campion.”

  When the introductions had been accomplished, the young man went off to find the gardener and Tonker led the way to Luke’s car. He was jaunty, as usual, very cheerful and intent on his own serious affairs.

  “So sorry I had to clear off this morning,” he said frankly to Luke as he took the seat next to the driver. “Are you all right at the back there, Campion? I couldn’t help going. These dear eager chaps could ruin the party by sheer inadvertence. We’ve just got to keep clear of the morning editions, that’s all. Once people are on their way it doesn’t matter what anybody prints, as far as I’m concerned. But we don’t want all this dreary rigmarole about Minnie’s crazy finances popping out before the fun starts. Very off-putting, homely finances. Take the joy out of anything.” He looked about him. “I say, Campion, have you noticed all this? What do you think of it? What a clot the man Smith is, eh?”

  Mr. Campion saw Luke’s neck muscles stiffen. He had started the engine but did not let in the clutch, and they sat looking at the open plain, golden in the afternoon sun.

  “It’s a rum place,” said Luke suddenly, his voice sounding deep after Tonker’s lighter tone. “I couldn’t get any explanation of it out of the gardener, who only seems to work here the odd day or so. It’s got a familiar look. It’s like the beginning of a racecourse.”

  Suddenly there was a deep silence in the car. Presently Tonker began to laugh, his solid shoulders shaking.

  “Minnie’s in the way over there, isn’t she?” he observed contentedly, waving to the distant oasis. “Spread out like an Ascot hat just about halfway down the second mile. I don’t know what the good Sheikh Hassan Ben-Sabah would say to that, the blackhearted old buzzard.”

  “Sheikh Ben-Sabah of Murdek, ’forty-three?” Luke turned round in his seat to Tonker. “Were you there?”

  “I Corps, Deception. Were you?”

  Mr. Campion caught a glimpse of popping sugar-bag eyes as Tonker fielded this gift from God.

  “Was I not! S.I.B.” Luke spoke from the heart. “What a rat that chap Ben-Sabah was.”

  “Oh, an excrescence!” Tonker was blowing gently. “A veritable shower of unwanted grease.”

  Luke grunted. “A darned dangerous finger,” he announced, adding as he recollected himself somewhat, “and a very wicked man. He got at blokes I’d have gone bail for, and they weren’t the only ones.”

  “By no means.” Tonker was wagging his head like an elder prefect. “Far too many chaps who ought to have known better fell for it. One body-snatcher in particular. Ben-Sabah had the necessary ackers, dear boy, the much publicised alchemy of the East. He made the thing too easy. Do you recall exactly how it was done?”

  From his seat so close behind them Mr. Campion became aware that he himself was receiving instruction, and he wondered for the hundredth time during his long acquaintance with Tonker just exactly how the old villain always managed to divine what exactly one was up to. He had a gift for it, just as remarkable in its way as Old Harry’s. Luke, who had been taken out of himself for a moment, was falling in with Tonker’s present requirements in the most obliging way, completely ignorant of the part he was playing.

  “Yes, I do,” he said at once, “only too well. I was up against the brute, trying to pin him down. We never did it. He licked us. It was watertight.”

  “Of course it was.” Tonker was encouraging. “First of all, he nobbled the bloke he wanted to bribe. And then he sold him a horse, cheap.”

  “That was it.” Luke was leaning on the wheel, his thoughts far away in a dusty fly-blown land. “First the chap had to buy the horse. The sale was put on record. Then Soapy Sabah kept it and raced it for him, and told him when to back it. Sometimes it won and sometimes it lost, and it all went down in the books. And then one day, soon after the motor-tyres or back axles or whatever Sabah was trying to get hold of had mysteriously disappeared, the horse won again, and that time the owner happened to have put a packet on it, and the odds were very right. What could you do? You could grill him until you were tired, you could examine his bank balance, you could search his kit, you could shake up his friends, you could instruct the people at home to frighten his family, you could court-martial him, but you couldn’t beat the record. There it was, all straight, all in order: win two quid, lose two quid, lose again, lose again, win again, and then, just at the right moment, a ruddy great win at ruddy great odds. It was the one safe way of bribing a man who was being watched. Oh well, it couldn’t happen here.”

  “Why not?” Tonker was dangerously quiet.

  “Because,” said Luke innocently, “you need a crooked little racecourse to work it.”

  “Of course.” Tonker purred like a cat at a cream jug. “I overlooked that, eh, Campion? You can’t start a racecourse in England without sanction from the Jockey Club, and they’d look very closely at the man who wanted to lash out in such a sensational way just now. A lad like Genappe, who is absolutely Caesar’s wife, might manage it, but no one else. He’s an old man and he might sell it of course, after a year or so, not realising what was happening, but even then I expect it would all be looked into. Wouldn’t it, Campion? They’d make terrific enquiries, get someone whose opinion they valued to vet the whole thing, wouldn’t they? I mean,
say someone wanted to start a racecourse here, for instance, and the Jockey Club sent for you—”

  Mr. Campion began to laugh. “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, Tonker,” he said. “Let’s get going, Charles, unless you’ve set your heart on waiting for the cook.”

  Luke let in the clutch. “Some other time,” he said. “She left the house about nine this morning and hasn’t been home all day. There’s a secretary, though. The gardener hasn’t seen her since yesterday, but he says she’s usually in the village.”

  “That’s Miss Pinkerton.” Tonker was helpful. “She’ll be at Minnie’s. She haunts the place like the Fairy No-good. A little bit of tidying here and a little bit of tidying there. She flitters through life hiding things. That’s where she is and that’s where I ought to be. If I mistake not, there’s some intensive organisation to be done down there before tomorrow. Last time I saw it, they’d secreted the whole of the liquor supply on the wrong side of the river, which they propose to make impassable. That is the sort of grave error into which the poor muggins fall without me. Do you propose to keep me long, Chief Inspector.”

  Luke suppressed a smile. “I sincerely hope not, sir,” he said and trod on the accelerator.

  Superintendent Fred South, his green hat square on his scented head, was sitting by the porch of the mill-house when they pulled up beside the race, and as they got out of the car he rose and came grinning towards them. Tonker took one look at him and stepped back a pace.

  “Oh dear, it’s got a bend in it,” he murmured to Campion and chuckled at his bewildered expression. “Haven’t you heard that yet? You must have been out of Town a week. You’ll be sick of it tomorrow. It’s the Augusts’ latest catch-phrase. Very telling. You’d be surprised. Now then, what do these chaps want? Do you know? Thumbs down the seam of the trouser leg, Tonker, and speak up.”

  He was still truculent when they all trooped into Aunt Hatt’s formal dining-room and sat down round a gate-legged table which had been thought a pleasant possession when it was new and the men who sat round it wore lace at their knees.

  Charlie Luke was dog-tired and his private affairs were giving him a physical pain in his chest. Left to himself, he would have been content with a brief questioning, turned the man loose, then watched him for twenty-four hours. But as it was, with Fred South sitting about like a Chinese with a joke, there was nothing for it but to do the job properly.

  The inquisition began formally. “Now, Mr. Cassands, as you know, we’re enquiring into the death of Leonard Terence Dennis Ohman. Do you recall when it was that you last saw the deceased?”

  “About March the twenty-fourth,” said Tonker promptly. “I spoke to my wife on the telephone as soon as I reached London this morning, and she told me you’d been to see her. Naturally I guessed you would ask about the fellow and so I worked it out. March the twenty-fourth. I know I’d just won a tenner on the Lincoln and I was on the stairs of The Beckoning Lady, when I saw this shadow flitting by in the passage below, and I thought to myself then, ‘Thank God I’ve won the doings and not Minnie, or that depressing sight would get his grabbers on it’. So it must have been about the date the race was run. I wouldn’t be thinking of it weeks after, would I?” He looked at South. “Or before it happened,” he said distinctly. “I haven’t spoken to the man for over twenty years.”

  Luke’s tired eyes flickered upwards. “Not at all?”

  “Not once.” Tonker produced it as a minor record. “I was not drawn to him many years ago when he was the rent collector, and when I heard he had reappeared in an even more sinister guise I’m afraid I left him to my poor wife, as indeed I often did then.”

  “Very well, Mr. Cassands. Can you recall what you did all day on the Thursday of last week?”

  “Yes.” Tonker spoke readily again. “As I think my wife told you, she and I quarrelled about an outrageous suggestion the fellow had made. It was about us divorcing to put his books right, or something equally fantastic.”

  Luke nodded.

  “That was on the Wednesday evening,” the sandy man continued. “On Thursday we were late up because we did the cross-word puzzle together in bed, and we had a scratch lunch about twelve. Then my wife went along to the boat house with Dinah and I shaved. Then I went in to poor old Will and had a chat, but he was very tired and very deaf, and so finally there was no help for it and I had to settle down in the drawing-room and do the work I’d brought with me. That was very interesting. Do you want to hear about that?”

  “No.” Luke spoke hurriedly. “When did you settle down?”

  “About three. I was still in pyjamas and a dressing-gown.”

  “How long did you stay there?”

  “Oh, until supper. About eight, I suppose.”

  “Didn’t you see anybody at all, all that time?”

  “I don’t think so. Dinah brought me a cup of tea. I remember I got up and unlocked the door for her.”

  “You’d locked yourself in?”

  “Yes, I did. I thought I heard somebody in the house, and I thought it might be some visitor. I wasn’t dressed, and I didn’t want to be disturbed, so I locked the door. Safest way.”

  “Didn’t you know who it was?”

  “Nor did I care,” said Tonker cheerfully. “I work very hard, you know.”

  Luke sighed. “Mr. Cassands, how did you know that I should be interested in what you were doing on that particular day? Why did you think that Ohman died on the Thursday?”

  The sandy man was pulled up short. He appeared astounded.

  “That’s clever,” he announced, conferring as it were a minor accolade upon the Chief Inspector. “How did I know? Wait a minute. Yes. The portrait reappeared. We found it on the Friday, when Will seemed a bit queer. Minnie said Little Doom must have brought it back, and I was annoyed with her for giving it to him. Then at dawn this morning my wife woke me and said that Little Doom had been dead in a ditch for a week, and I suppose I assumed that she meant that he’d died when he returned the picture. What else?”

  “What about this?” Fred South had risen from his chair with his now familiar little box in his hand. He appeared to have a story-book detective’s fixation about idiotic exhibits, Luke reflected gloomily.

  Tonker screwed up his eyes. “What is it?” he enquired ungraciously of South. “A beetle?” Finally he recognised it. “That’s off some dreary fancywork hanging in the cloakroom at Minnie’s. A Victorian waistcoat, old-hat as the do-do. I think they hope to make me wear that tomorrow.”

  “Aren’t you going to?” South sounded almost disappointed.

  “Not if I can help it. I’ve got something better.”

  The Superintendent put his bead away. “I think you smoke Blue Zephyrs, Mr. Cassands?”

  “So I do, and I’ve run out and had to get some of these. But they sell ’em in the village. Why? Am I the only person who smokes ’em down here?”

  “Er—no.” It was evident that South had enquired. “No, they are sometimes sold to other people.”

  “Too bad,” said Tonker, misunderstanding the entire situation. “You’ll have to light one of these and be thankful.”

  South refused the cigarette and went out of the room, to return almost at once with a ploughshare, which he placed on the table. It was not the murder weapon but one very like it, and it lay on the black oak, rusty and ancient and decorative. Tonker regarded it with great interest.

  “What a nice thing,” he remarked, taking it up by the cray so that it was like an axe in his hand, the point of the triangular wing downward. “It’s a ploughshare, isn’t it? Make a good tomahawk.” His eyes widened as the significance occurred to him. “Good Lord, is this what it was done with? What a horrible pecker!” He put it down at once, dusting his hands. “You ought to test that for finger-prints,” he said seriously. “They’ve got a wonderful new process.”

  “We’ve seen to all that, sir.” Luke spoke quietly. He was looking at South steadily and gradually the twinkling eyes gave
way under the stare.

  When the gathering was once more under control, he returned to the hieroglyphics on the crumpled pad of envelopes in his hand. He looked very tall and tired, and his fine head drooped a little.

  “Very well,” he began. “I think I’ve got all I want from you at the moment, sir. I’ll just confirm this one point. You assure me that you have never, within the last twenty years, had a conversation with this ex-employee of the Inland Revenue, and that during the whole of the time he was employed by your wife you . . .?”

  “What!” Tonker’s snarl of rage was a triumph even for him. To those unprepared for his lightning temper it had all the electrifying effect of a sudden manifestation of mania. “Say those unutterably idiotic words again.” He had bounded to his feet. His hand had closed over the cray of the ploughshare and his eyes seemed to be bursting from his head. Both policemen stared at him in amazement. “Do you mean to tell me,” demanded Tonker, shaking the ploughshare as if it were indeed a tomahawk, “that Mrs. Cassands paid that man to make her life a little hell? Answer me, did she do that?”

  “I understood she paid him something to write the letters, sir.” Luke had no desire to become involved in a domestic squabble, and indeed had done his best to avoid it all along. “I think she . . .”

  “Then I give up.” Tonker slammed down the ploughshare and every hair on his head, face and tweeds appeared to bristle. “I’m surrounded by lunatics. There’s only one thing for it. If the law of this land is going to persist in its delusion that my wife and I are the same person, and that person is me, it must be logical about it. My wife must lose her vote, or pass it to me. They must rescind the Married Woman’s Property Act. And every time the lady signs her name to anything or employs anybody, the contract must be endorsed by me. Otherwise the position is untenable, as anyone can see, I should have thought.” He paused and stood steaming. “And I didn’t murder the man,” he continued with a sudden return of fury. “I may have felt like it, but I didn’t see him. What I did do when my wife told me of this latest and most monstrous demand was to lose my temper, black her eye and break a window. That I was ashamed of. But this final piece of insanity of which you have just told me makes me want to do it again. Good-afternoon.”