The Riddle at Gipsy's Mile

by Clara Benson

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ said Angela. ‘Why, I shouldn’t describe any of these sculptures as flagrant, even if they are a little daring. Is it time yet?’

  But Freddy was staring into space thoughtfully, and did not seem to have heard.

  ‘Let the fun begin!’ declaimed Marguerite at last. ‘Freddy, would you be a darling and open the door?’

  An hour later the thing was in full swing and Angela was rather enjoying herself. She had made the acquaintance of the vicar’s wife, Mrs. Henderson, a sensible, youngish woman who, glass of wine in hand, had gazed at Marguerite’s sculptures and declared them to be ‘awfully clever, although I probably oughtn’t to admit that I can see what they’re meant to be, ought I?’ She lowered her voice confidentially. ‘I’m fairly sure my husband has no idea what he has given his approval to, so it’s probably best not to tell him, don’t you agree?’ The two of them laughed merrily, and Mrs. Henderson put a mischievous finger over her lips.

  It looked as though the exhibition were a roaring success. Angela looked about her. Marguerite had introduced her to several people who were meant to be among the most important personages in London—at least, as far as the new art movements were concerned—but there were also one or two people she recognized from the local area, including Sergeant Spillett and P. C. Bass, who were both in uniform and, she guessed, there to see that the crowds did not get out of hand. She frowned as she spotted Freddy, who was whispering into the ear of a disreputable-looking old man. What was he up to?

  ‘Hallo, Mrs. Marchmont—Angela,’ said a voice at her shoulder, and she turned to see Lucy Syms standing next to her.

  ‘Why, Lucy, how nice to see you again,’ said Angela. ‘Where is Gil?’

  ‘Over there,’ said Lucy, nodding towards the door. Angela turned and saw Gilbert Blakeney and his mother receiving an effusive greeting from Marguerite. Gil wore his usual slightly foolish expression, while Lady Alice was at her most gracious.

  ‘Lucy, darling, come and see these sculptures and tell me what you think of them,’ said Cynthia, who had just then approached them and put her hand on the girl’s arm. ‘I am trying to put together a little piece on this exhibition for the Clarion—the society column, you know—so tiresome, but necessary—and I’d simply adore to hear what you think of it all.’

  She bore Lucy away, leaving Angela by herself for a few moments, until Gil and his mother came to speak to her. Mrs. Henderson soon joined them, and listened courteously to some minor complaint of Lady Alice’s about the vicar’s last sermon. The Blakeneys then turned away to talk to someone else, and Angela remained in conversation with the vicar’s wife. Mrs. Henderson was a sympathetic listener and Angela, rather to her surprise, found herself telling the story of how she had discovered Lita’s body several weeks earlier.

  Mrs. Henderson shook her head soberly.

  ‘Such a sad tale,’ she said. ‘I understand they have arrested the man who did it. Has he confessed?’

  ‘No,’ said Angela. ‘I don’t believe he has. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe he did it,’ she said suddenly, and she was surprised at the relief she felt at having finally said it aloud. The nagging doubt that had been sitting at the back of her mind for several weeks now was finally out in the open. She did not believe that Johnny Chang had murdered Lita de Marquez.

  Mrs. Henderson raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Why not?’

  Angela remembered what Alvie Berteau had said to her, and thought back to that night at the Copernicus Club and her brief introduction to the calm, watchful Johnny Chang.

  ‘He didn’t hate her enough,’ she said. ‘Whoever killed her did so out of hatred.’

  ‘Do you mean because he disfigured her face?’ said Mrs. Henderson.

  ‘Not only that,’ said Angela. ‘It’s an awfully violent thing to do, I admit, but it’s logical if you want to prevent the police from finding out who she was. But I was rather referring to the thing as a whole. It’s almost incomprehensible: someone brought her down here and deliberately poisoned her to put her out of the way. Rather a lot of effort to go to for a girl who worked in a night-club and presumably gave no trouble to anybody, don’t you think?’

  ‘Then she must have given trouble to somebody,’ said Mrs. Henderson. ‘You might bash a girl over the head in a fit of anger, but you don’t poison somebody on the spur of the moment.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Angela eagerly. That was what she had been struggling to put into words herself. She glanced around and saw Lady Alice, who was still standing nearby, regarding her intently. The old woman caught Angela’s eye and looked away.

  ‘I wonder how they lured her down here,’ said Mrs. Henderson. She was about to say something else, when their attention was arrested by the sound of a disturbance across the other side of the room, and they turned to see P. C. Bass, blushing furiously, throwing a coat over one of Marguerite’s art-works, while people looked on with varying degrees of amusement or astonishment.

  Marguerite pushed her way through the crowd and accosted the young constable.

  ‘What on earth are you doing? Oh, do please be careful with that,’ she said, as she saw Bass preparing to throw a jacket over another one of the sculptures. She turned to Sergeant Spillett, who was now approaching. ‘What is going on?’ she said.

  The room had now fallen silent. Sergeant Spillett, also slightly pink in the face, said, ‘We’ve just now received a formal complaint about these here statues from a member of the public, who considers them to be obscene and an affront to public decency. We are obliged to act on any such complaints, so it is my official duty to tell you that this exhibition is now closed.’

  ‘What?’ exclaimed Marguerite. She put her hand beseechingly on Spillett’s arm. ‘Why, sergeant, you can’t mean it, surely?’

  ‘I’m afraid I do,’ said the sergeant. ‘You must all leave immediately. Mr. Henderson, if you’ll kindly give me the keys, I shall make sure the door is locked. P. C. Bass and I will come back tomorrow to examine these statues in greater detail—’

  ‘I’ll bet they will,’ murmured Freddy at Angela’s elbow.

  ‘—to see if there are any grounds for prosecution.’

  ‘Prosecution?’ gasped Marguerite in horror. ‘But my sculptures! What are you going to do with them? Surely nobody could find them offensive? Why, they are merely abstract representations of certain aspects of the human body in all its natural glory and beauty. What is offensive about that?’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said Spillett uncomfortably, ‘but it’s not for me to decide in the final instance. A judge may decide that they ought to be destroyed.’

  As soon as he said that, Vassily gave a great roar of outrage.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘You would destroy our work? Are you mad? It is great crime to destroy art. Art does not answer to conventions of society but stands alone and speaks for itself. You are worse than Bolsheviks!’

  ‘Now, we’ll have none of that,’ said the sergeant, who was not entirely sure what Bolsheviks meant but suspected that it might be rude from the sound of it. He stepped forward to throw his own coat over another sculpture, but Marguerite clung to his arm and let out a wail.

  ‘Please, madam,’ said Spillett. He shook her off, possibly more roughly than he had intended to. At this, Vassily gave another roar, threw his arms around the sergeant and wrestled him to the floor. There were screams and cries as everybody tried to get out of the way, and P. C. Bass flapped around uselessly, at a loss, as Sergeant Spillett curled up and tried to fend off the young sculptor’s pummelling.

  ‘I say, this won’t do,’ cried Freddy, alarmed. He rushed forward and began pulling at Vassily’s jacket, in an attempt to get him off the policeman. Vassily resisted for a few moments, then stood up, causing Freddy to topple backwards and knock against a tall stand on which was displayed the final and most splendid piece in Vassily’s Eternity of the Damned series, a tortured nude about eighteen inches high.

&nbs
p; There was a collective gasp of dismay, followed by a dead silence as everybody watched the stand rock violently. Three times it swayed from side to side, then, just as it looked as though all might be safe, Freddy made a last-second grab to try and steady it—but instead caught the sculpture itself with his arm. The statue teetered dangerously for a second or two, then toppled off its perch. It seemed to take forever to hit the ground, but finally it landed with a great thud, and there was a loud ‘Oh!’ from the crowd as the head detached itself from the body and skittered off across the floor. Nobody spoke. Freddy looked fearfully at Vassily, whose expression was not unlike that on the face of the statue which had just been so rudely decapitated.

  ‘I say, I’m most awfully sorry,’ he said feebly.

  Vassily, white in the face, put his hands to his hair and pulled at it as though not quite knowing what he did, then he turned slowly to face Freddy. The roar started low within his belly, but quickly gathered momentum and was finally given full vent as he opened his mouth to release it. Freddy cringed and then turned to run, but Vassily was too quick for him and, with a mighty leap, brought him down and began raining blows upon his head.

  It was as though pandemonium had been let loose. People screamed and ran for the door, glasses were kicked over and crushed under-foot, and the vicar stood at the side of the room, wringing his hands. Miles and Gil hustled a shocked Lady Alice out of the way, while Marguerite fainted dead into the arms of William, who had just at that moment come in to find out whether he was wanted yet. He held onto her in astonishment; then, as nobody seemed inclined to tell him what to do with her, scooped her up and carried her outside.

  Meanwhile, Sergeant Spillett had been pulled to his feet by P. C. Bass and was looking about him in confusion, wanting to restore order but not knowing where to begin. However, as most people had now made it out of the place, there was little left for him to do except to enlist one or two burly farmers to help him and Bass overpower Vassily. The young artist was finally borne away, struggling violently and swearing loudly in several languages, and Freddy was left lying on the floor, groaning. Angela picked her way through the mess and looked down at him.

  ‘Are you still alive?’ she said.

  He squinted up at her.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ he said weakly.

  She held out a hand and helped him to his feet. He staggered a little, then tested his jaw gingerly to see whether Vassily had broken it. Apparently the investigation produced a satisfactory result, for he then bent down stiffly and began to brush himself off.

  ‘No broken bones, as far as I can tell,’ he remarked.

  ‘Well, it would serve you jolly well right if there were,’ said Angela severely.

  Freddy assumed an injured expression.

  ‘It was an accident!’ he said. ‘You must have seen that. I was trying to rescue poor old Spillett from that idiot Vassily. It wasn’t my fault I lost my balance and knocked the dratted statue over.’

  ‘You know very well that’s not what I meant,’ said Angela. ‘I saw exactly what you did earlier. For shame, Freddy! How could you do it?’

  Freddy opened his mouth to argue, but was forestalled by a commotion nearby. They turned and saw a little group of people, among them Miles, Gil and Lucy, fussing over Lady Alice, who had apparently been taken ill. She was led to a chair, clutching her heart, and given some water to drink.

  ‘Somebody fetch a doctor immediately,’ commanded Lucy, who was busy chafing the old lady’s wrists.

  ‘Oh, dear me,’ said the vicar. ‘Dr. Burns was here earlier. Perhaps he is still outside. I shall go and see.’ He hurried off.

  Gil was standing to one side, looking ashen-faced.

  ‘Is there anything we can do to help?’ said Angela in concern. ‘Lady Alice, you must be cold. Let me bring you your coat.’

  ‘Thank you, but there is really nothing wrong with me,’ said Lady Alice, although she looked anything but well.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Gil, relieved to be able to do something. He brought the coat and placed it tenderly over his mother’s shoulders.

  The doctor arrived, took one look at Lady Alice and pronounced that she must be put to bed immediately. Nobody was inclined to disagree, so the old lady was escorted out gently and taken home in the Blakeneys’ stately old Wolseley, while the doctor followed in his own car, leaving Miles, Freddy and Angela to survey the damage wrought by the stampede.

  ‘That was a little more eventful than I expected,’ said Miles finally.

  ‘I say, I hope Lady Alice is going to be all right,’ said Freddy. He looked worried. ‘Is it her heart, do you think? I hope the—er—fracas didn’t set her off.’

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ said Miles. ‘Come on, we had better get home. There will be all kinds of hell to pay tomorrow if I’m not much mistaken.’

  He strode out. Angela glanced at Freddy, who was still looking upset.

  ‘I hope she’s going to be all right,’ he repeated.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The next day at breakfast, they had word from Blakeney Park that Lady Alice was seriously ill and unable to speak to anyone. Marguerite sent her sympathies and offers of help, although there did not seem to be much that they could do: the old woman’s personal physician had been summoned from town, and she was receiving the best care that a healthy income could pay for. All they could do now was hope that she would somehow find the inner resources to pull through.

  In reality, Marguerite had little attention to spare for the Blakeneys’ plight, since she was more immediately concerned about the disastrous ending to her grand exhibition opening, and the possibility that her works would be destroyed—not to mention the effect the whole fiasco might be expected to have on her artistic reputation. Moreover, there was the awkward but unavoidable fact that her protégé, Vassily, was now sullenly enduring the hospitality of the local police, and must somehow be dealt with. The Littlechurch police seemed inclined to take a dim view of his unprovoked attack on one of their number—being perhaps less accustomed to this sort of high-spirited behaviour than the police in London—and were making noises about arraigning him on an assault and battery charge. Nothing could be done about him until Monday, but in the meantime the church hall needed clearing up, and so immediately after breakfast Marguerite prepared to set off and begin work.

  ‘By the way, darling,’ she said carelessly to Angela, ‘would you mind awfully if I borrowed William? A strong young man will be just the thing to help me clear away all that mess.’

  ‘By all means,’ said Angela, smiling to herself. She looked across at Freddy to see his reaction, but he seemed absorbed in his own thoughts and had not heard the exchange. Shortly afterwards he got up and slunk out of the room. Angela decided it was time to have a word with him, and so rose and followed him into the parlour. She shut the door behind her and he looked up warily.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘Have you come to gloat?’

  ‘Why on earth should I gloat?’ said Angela. ‘You got yourself into a mess and now you’re worried that someone is going to die because of it. What is there to gloat about?’

  ‘That ass, Vassily,’ said Freddy crossly. ‘It’s because of him that the whole thing got out of hand. If he’d only kept his temper then everyone would have filed out calmly like good boys and girls and nobody would have had a heart attack.’

  ‘But why did you do it?’ said Angela.

  ‘Why, because I wanted a story, of course,’ said Freddy, as though the answer were perfectly obvious. ‘They’ve come to expect it of me. After that article I wrote about the Copernicus, and the one about leading the police to Johnny Chang, I was the golden boy in old Bickerstaffe’s view—why, I could do no wrong. I felt almost as though I could walk on water. Every time I went out to report on a story, something exciting happened and I got a scoop. But in the last week or two things have quietened down and I haven’t had so much as a bite of a scandal, and then they sent me to write about a sculpture exhibition
of all things, in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, where there was absolutely no chance of anything interesting happening, so I thought I’d better try and—well—spice things up a bit. But I swear I never meant the thing to turn into a free-for-all. I only meant for the police to shut it down and for everyone to leave quietly, then I should have got a nice little story and stayed in Bickerstaffe’s good books, while Marguerite would have got some first-rate publicity—you know how the man in the street loves an outrage to public decency.’

  ‘So you got that man to make an official complaint to the police,’ said Angela.

  ‘Yes. The old fellow is a regular trouble-maker about these parts, as I understand it, and is always looking out for an opportunity to make money to fund his ten pints a day, so I slipped him a couple of quid on condition that he do the business. It was all going swimmingly, but then Vassily lost his head and set off a riot, and now you’re going to tell everyone and if the old woman dies I suppose they’ll all blame me for having given her heart failure,’ he finished petulantly.

  ‘Freddy, have you any morals at all?’ said Angela, shaking her head in exasperation.

  ‘Of course I have,’ he returned indignantly. ‘I’ll admit that I’m not above taking a short-cut or two, but there is a line that I will not cross.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know it,’ said Angela. ‘So am I to understand that you deliberately arranged the fight at the Copernicus Club?’

  ‘Oh, no, that was quite genuine,’ Freddy assured her. ‘If you’d known Gertie as long as I have you’d know that that sort of thing tends to follow her around.’

  ‘And Johnny Chang?’ said Angela, a horrid feeling stealing over her. ‘I hope you didn’t pay that waiter to make up stories about him.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t!’ he said, outraged. ‘How could you even suggest such a thing? Listen,’ he went on, ‘I really did start out well in the job, you know. But I had started to feel that I had to keep on delivering the goods if I were to prove myself worthy. Truly, Angela, I promise on my honour that last night was the first time I had ever tried something of this kind.’