Death of Jezebel

by Christianna Brand

  ‘Like the people behind one in the cheap seats at the cinema,’ said Charlesworth, pleasantly. Nobody seemed to share his familiarity with the cheap seats at the cinema, however: it was sticky going. Personally he thought the old boy was just having a beautiful pipe-dream with his ‘heaved over’ and ‘pitched across the railing’ and all the rest of it: getting past his job a bit, no doubt, and all those threatening notes had gone to his head.

  A constable knocked at the door and handed in a folded note. The eyes of the eleven poor prisoners turned to it eagerly, shifted, glanced politely aside. Charlesworth read it through twice and then put it into his pocket. He said to the constable: ‘All right. Tell the police surgeon I’m glad to have this, and I’ll wait for his final confirmation.’

  Meanwhile, said the note, Isabel Drew had died within one minute either way of hitting the ground. She had died of manual strangulation: no chiffon veil caught on nails—nothing like that. She had been in what amounted to a ‘sealed room’ with eleven knights in phoney armour: and while the eleven knights sat their horses in full view of several thousand people, one of them had gone up into the tower and strangled her and thrown her down.

  All about them, beyond the glass windows of the little office, the exhibition proceeded upon its course, the buzz and chatter heightened almost to a roar by the violent excitement of Isabel’s terrible end. Never again would the young ladies with the Slomber Nets do so much business: if the exhibitors had had their way a fresh young woman would have been sacrificed every night upon the tower as long as the exhibition remained open. Meanwhile the buzz and chatter and clamour rolled on…

  Within Susan Betchley there glowed a fire which would not be concealed: but she lowered her lids upon the blaze of it, and continued with her account of the evening, precisely and clearly. ‘The pageant was due to begin at six o’clock. At twenty-five to, I looked over the whole place, as I’ve told you. There was nobody behind the scenes yet, the dressing rooms were empty, the horses were in their stables with Bill Clever, the groom in charge: and nobody else. And there was nobody on the stage or in the tower or anywhere in the Assembly room—you can take my word for that. At about twenty-to the knights began to arrive. Most of them spoke to me before going into the Assembly room to collect their armour. They always used to rehearse in armour, of course, because of getting themselves and the horses used to it: they’d developed different habits, some of them changed in the Assembly room itself and then clanked back to the stalls to get their horses, some of them lugged their armour through and changed in the stalls. You couldn’t tell which did what: and once they were in the armour, they were practically unrecognizable anyway. I checked them all in: by ten-to everybody had arrived except Mr. Anderson. At least I thought he hadn’t come yet. I was worried and I spoke to Mr. Port about it. Mr. Port said not to worry: he went and knocked on Miss Drew’s door and she called out to him, and then he went away towards the dressing rooms and I didn’t see him again. But a few moments later Miss Kirk turned up and she said that Earl Anderson was there all the time.’

  ‘Did anyone else see him to speak to?’ asked Charlesworth of the company in general.

  Nobody had. ‘But then of course he must have ridden on later with all the other knights,’ said Miss Betchley. ‘Because after all, he was there.’

  ‘Yes, now—tell us about that.’

  ‘Well, Mr. Bryan rode through first as he always does at rehearsals, and took up his place as the leader of the knights. I said a word to him. Wished him luck and so on. The others came jumbling through in ones and twos and sorted themselves out into their proper order: some of them mounted in the stalls and rode through, others led their horses and mounted in the Assembly room. By now it must have been seven or eight minutes to the hour. Miss Kirk was rather late.’

  ‘I kept her “rather late”,’ said Cockrill. ‘I couldn’t see what she wanted to go mucking about behind the scenes for anyway, since it wasn’t her job—and she was scared. But she said that she’d got into the habit of it, and Miss Betchley would be needing her—so off she went.’ Even to his own dry heart he would not acknowledge how bitterly he regretted now that he had ever let her go: pretty, frightened, unhappy Perpetua…

  ‘Well, anyway, very soon afterwards, Miss Drew came out of her room and went quickly across the Assembly room. Miss Kirk followed her and said something to her, and then Miss Drew went into her tower, and Miss Kirk left the Assembly room and went down towards the dressing rooms: she generally went and checked up that all the knights were ready. There’s a whole wilderness of dressing rooms and corridors back there.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘There were only one or two more knights to come: as soon as I’d checked them all in, I locked the door on them to keep them safely there, and sat down on my little stool outside it: and I just sat on there, whistling away to myself and never moved away.’

  ‘What did you whistle?’ said Charlesworth, unexpectedly. (These University detectives with their fancy ways!)

  Miss Betchley looked surprised. ‘I only know one tune: so I expect it was that. “Sur le pont D’Avignon…”’

  ‘And you never moved away at all?’ said Cockrill, sticking pointedly to the matter in hand.

  ‘I never budged.’

  ‘This is awfully important,’ said Charlesworth, earnestly. ‘If for any reason—any reason at all, quite unconnected with the murder, perhaps—you moved from that stool, it’s your duty to say so. In fact, it may be very much to your advantage to say so.’

  ‘Because after the knights had ridden through on to the stage, I’m the only person who could have followed Isabel up to the tower and murdered her.’

  Charlesworth made her a little bow. ‘You have a singularly clear mind.’

  ‘Well, I have a singularly clear conscience too,’ said Susan Betchley, coolly. ‘And I tell you flat that I didn’t budge an inch.’

  ‘And nobody went through after that? Not even Miss Kirk or Mr. Port?’

  Miss Betchley shook her head firmly. ‘I—well, I was in and out of the Assembly room and the dressing rooms seeing to things,’ said Mr. Port, hurriedly. ‘And then I went and stood in the crowd. There was nothing more for me to do. Miss Betchley had the whole thing well in hand, all the knights had arrived, Isabel—Miss Drew—was already in her dressing room changing. I wanted to see from out front what the effects were like: I wanted to listen to the comments of the people, and generally see how things went. Just for future reference you know…’ He mopped his pink forehead. ‘I—I saw her fall.’

  Eleven knights. And Isabel. In what amounted to a ‘sealed room’. And while the eleven knights sat their horses in full view of several thousand people, one of them had gone up into the tower and strangled her with his hands: and thrown her down.

  Proceedings were interrupted by the arrival of Charlesworth’s henchman, Sergeant Bedd: large, thickset, grizzled, kindly, in his stove-pipe utility suit. He had come from a cursory search of Earl Anderson’s flat. Nobody there. ‘And, funny thing, sir,’ said Sergeant Bedd, eyeing Charlesworth for permission to speak in front of the old boy in the comic mackintosh—obvious police of some kind, all the same—‘what’s more no bedroom slippers: if you see what I mean.’

  Charlesworth saw what he meant at once. ‘Done a bunk, eh? Oh, by the way, Sergeant, this is Inspector Cockrill Kent police.’

  Sergeant Bedd’s large face took on a look of mingled excitement and awe. ‘Good lord, sir: not Inspector Cockrill? Not that affair of the sanded paths down at Swansmere? And them decapitations at Pigeonsford?’

  ‘And the anaesthetic deaths at Heron’s Park hospital,’ said Inspector Cockrill, grimly.

  ‘Ah, yes: you was unfortunate there, sir. These things do happen: you’ll remember, Mr. Charlesworth, we had a bit of a slip-up ourselves in that yachting business down in Devonshire?’

  An extraordinarily pleasant fellow, really, for a Londoner. And observant too. ‘You say Anderson’s slippers are missing from his f
lat?’

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ said Bedd. ‘And his shaving tackle and toothbrush and things. Of course they may be poked away somewhere: I didn’t take time to have a real good search. But I had the impression that the gent had done a bunk, sir. If that’s what you expected?’ He cocked his head to one side like an intelligent, elderly rough-haired terrier.

  ‘We’re getting the ports and stations and things watched,’ said Charlesworth to Cockrill. ‘So he can’t get far. After all he was in the building less than an hour ago.’

  ‘If he was in the building,’ said Cockrill: two could play at the fancy stuff.

  Left to their own devices in the office, the ten knights fell to a discussion of Isabel’s death, bored or excited according to the parts they had decided to play—for most of them were out-of-work actors and incapable of being merely themselves. Mr. Port sat silent, wringing his pudgy hands. Miss Betchley moved over unobtrusively to Brian Two-Times, perched on the edge of his chair, drumming with his feet on the ground, his blue eyes afire. He said contemptuously: ‘Vonderful exhibition we have now of the English police force. Talk-talk-talk and nothing do. Terrific!’

  ‘These people talk,’ she said: ‘but there are a lot of others doing things behind the scenes. Fingerprints and—checking-up and all that. I don’t think they’re as casual as they seem.’ She added deliberately: ‘For my part, they can be as casual as they like.’

  He eyed her, her air of odd triumph. ‘You are not sorry, for one, to see Jezebel die?’

  ‘Revenge is sweet,’ she said, her eyes on his.

  He thought it over quietly. Then he said with an air of finality: ‘Yes.’

  She moved a little closer to him. ‘I thought I would tell you—if there’s anything more I can do…’

  He had an odd little movement of the head, drawing in his chin as though puzzled, considering deeply, jutting it out again. He said, mystified: ‘What then can you do?’

  ‘For you, I mean,’ she said.

  ‘For me? What can you do for me?’

  ‘I told them about your being first in the line,’ she said.

  He drew in his chin again. ‘Well—so I woss first in the line. You saw me, you spoke to me.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But it does not need your testimony. Everybody knows I woss there. And besides the girl was killed after this: by that time I woss on the stage.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know you were on the stage.’ She raised her eyebrows a little and moved away. ‘I only wanted you to know,’ she said.

  Sergeant Bedd, notebook in hand, took down the evidence of the eight knights, and Charlesworth sent them off to their homes. ‘We’ve got your names and addresses: and we’ve got your assurances, which I may as well remind you we can, and most definitely will, check, that you none of you ever so much as spoke to Miss Drew outside the exhibition, and then only in the ordinary way of business—the pageant, a drink in the pub and so forth. Is there anything anybody wants to add: or is that O.K.?’

  The knights chorused in plushy voices made plushier by RADA that this was indeed so; and so were dismissed to their homes and eventually from the case. None of them had so much as been to Elysian Hall at the time that the ‘murder notes’ had been planted on the intended victims; none of them had moved from the semi-circle at the edge of the stage. There was no use cluttering up the case, thought Charlesworth, with impossible suspects. They had quite enough to go on with.

  The police surgeon arrived with his little black bag. Charlesworth spoke to him outside the office door. ‘Hallo, doc? Have you finished mucking about with the lovely?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve finished,’ said the doctor, swinging the black bag gaily in one hand. ‘And I must say, a nice little armful she must have been when she was alive!’

  ‘She’s a nice little handful now that she’s dead,’ said Charlesworth. ‘Must you stick to this manual strangulation business? It makes things very awkward for me. You don’t think she can have caught her veil in a hook or something after all? There seem to be some pretty stout nails up there, holding up all that ridiculous tin ivy.’

  ‘No I do not: the veil was twisted round her throat probably just in case of finger marks; but somebody had taken two hands to her, outside the veil. It wasn’t the veil that killed her: and it wasn’t the rope. By the way, you haven’t seen her since we got down to the job, have you? We found some rummy bits and pieces when we started moving her about. Ropes and things. But she was strangled with two hands.’ He cheerfully departed: his not to reason how Isabel could have been manually strangled by one of eleven people at least fifteen feet away from her.

  Cockrill, in a fever to see the rummy bits and pieces, was nevertheless consumed with anxiety about Perpetua. Charlesworth departed for another look at the body, with instructions to Sergeant Bedd to fill in the interval by taking down the statements of the suspects, one by one: Cockrill saw no obligation to follow him, or to remain and have his testimony taken by the sergeant. He trotted off unobtrusively and sought out Inspector Stammers. ‘Any news?’

  Stammers shook his head. ‘Not a sausage. She hasn’t been home, she hasn’t rung up anywhere, she isn’t with any of her friends that we can rake up… And she isn’t in the building—not this part anyway, not as far as we can see.’

  ‘Alive or dead?’ said Cockie, without expression.

  ‘Neither. Of course this place is a nightmare of hiding places.’ He put a hand for a moment on the little man’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. We’re doing our best.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ said Cockie crossly. ‘I’m not the doting grandfather, you know.’ He walked smartly away.

  The man on duty at the Assembly room door seemed to take it for granted that he had a right of access, and he went in, and through the arch on to the stage. The body had been screened off from the avid curiosity of the exhibition sightseers, and Charlesworth was bending over it as Cockrill advanced. He glanced up briefly: ‘Any news of Miss Kirk?’

  ‘None,’ said Cockrill.

  ‘Nothing heard yet of Anderson either.’ He returned to the body. ‘Look what we’ve found!’

  Isabel’s twisted legs and arms had been mercifully straightened out. She looked very quiet and composed now, lying there covered by the cotton sheet, waiting more patiently than in life she had ever waited for anything, to be taken away to the cold loneliness of the mortuary. Cockrill bent over her, his hands on his knees. ‘What are these? Ropes?’

  A length of rope, about five feet long, and another, the same length, of stout twine. Each was tied in a noose. ‘They found them under the skirt of her dress when they turned her over,’ said Charlesworth.

  Cockie picked them up gingerly, and examined the ends, turning them over curiously in his brown fingers. ‘Most illuminating!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlesworth, doubtfully. He glanced up at the balcony above their heads. ‘No nonsense about lassos and things, though. That must be fourteen or fifteen feet up—the archway’s at least twelve, to allow for the knights riding through with their fixed standards and all that: and another three feet up to the balcony. Then the girl’s neck would be another four or five feet above her feet, if you see what I mean. So all in all…’ He appraised it carefully. ‘I think we could safely say twenty feet. So a rope five feet long made into a noose would not do much lassoing, And anyway why two lassos?’

  ‘It’s all very—confusing,’ said Cockie, with a light in his eye.

  ‘But then, of course there’s this: the knights on either side of the arch were sitting on horses which were sort of reared up on their hind legs. Say a man in that position is—what?—nine feet to the shoulder? He raises his arm, that’s another goodish bit, and then perhaps throws the lasso up a little, and the rope’s five feet…’ He broke off for a moment. ‘Of course it’s rather a new bit of rope: it would have shown up very white against all that ivy.’

  ‘The lights would not have moved up to the ivy perhaps,’ said Cockie. ‘Attention would have been co
ncentrated on the knights.’

  ‘Yes.’ He grew quite excited. ‘I wonder! What do you think, Inspector? Could it have been done?’

  ‘It might,’ said Cockie. ‘The girl died of manual strangulation, of course, but that’s a detail. It might have been done, as you say—if the rope had had hands.’

  They each had an ugly little vision of a rope with hands: of the stout twine curling itself into stringy fingers, knotted and twisted, seeking out the warm, round, golden throat. ‘Well, all I can say, then,’ said Charlesworth, laying them back in their wrappings, slightly crestfallen, ‘is what on earth were the two ropes for? They must have been chucked down with the body I suppose.’ He cheered up a little. ‘Perhaps he just brought them along in case.’

  Cockrill doubted whether there had been much ‘in case’ about this crime. He said: ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, this.’ Charlesworth fished out a small cellophane envelope: it contained a slip of paper, with some typewriting on it—but this time there were no pin-men. ‘It’s a poem, if you’ll believe me! Or shall we say a verse?’

  ‘Let’s hear it, either way,’ said Cockie, impatiently. ‘We’re not the B.B.C. Third Programme.’

  Charlesworth recited it with relish. ‘I’ve learnt it off by heart already!

  ‘“Oh, Isabel, how beautiful thy face is!

  It brings out homage in unexpected places.

  And so the donor of this little gift

  Is who?—the Mystery Knight upon the left!”’

  He looked at Cockrill alertly. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘Most illuminating,’ said Cockie again.

  ‘The knight upon her left would be Earl Anderson.’

  Cockie scratched his ear. ‘So much depends upon an “e” or a “y”.