Death of Jezebel

by Christianna Brand

  Perpetua in her pretty flowered frock, toiled up the narrow stairs at his heels. ‘On the afternoon of the day before the pageant. He used to ring me up most evenings if I didn’t see him, but his ’phone was cut off. Isabel rang me that evening about ten, and she said that she was going to ring him, but of course his line was n.b.g., because he hadn’t paid the rent: so she said she would ring Sugar-Daddy—Mr. Port, I mean—instead. I don’t know if she did.’

  Charlesworth jerked his head towards Sergeant Bedd. ‘Check with Port’s hotel.’ He waved a hand round the shoddy little flat. ‘Anything missing?’

  The police had searched the whole place pretty thoroughly, but it was now restored to order. Perpetua glanced at the hall-stand, glanced into the bedroom and the bathroom. ‘Yes, his hat’s gone: and his raincoat. It was drizzling a bit last night, wasn’t it? And his dressing gown and slippers used to hang here: and there don’t seem to be any pyjamas on his pillow. And his shaving things and his toothbrush and flannel and stuff…’ She broke off and stood staring. ‘But why on earth has he taken the bathroom curtains?’

  ‘The curtains?’

  ‘Yes, clear oilskin ones with seagulls on them with red beaks: only Earl said they looked like Spitfires and hung them upside down. But why on earth should he have taken them now? And where can he have gone?’ She looked at Charlesworth rather desperately; but more puzzled he thought than alarmed; or, if alarmed, more for the sake of her friend himself than for anything that he might have meant to her.

  He shrugged. ‘Of course it all may be nothing. He may have had an urgent call—apparently he did go out to the ’phone; he may have rushed off to visit his sick Mum or something, and has no idea there’s all this hue and cry: being as his Mum’s in the depths of the country, snowed up probably, or cut off by the floods, and they haven’t seen a newspaper this three weeks come Michaelmas…’

  ‘He hasn’t got a Mum,’ said Perpetua. ‘She’s dead. It’s much more likely to be a girl friend: he was always whizzing off without a moment’s notice, Casanovering. Yes, that’s it! I bet you anything, Inspector, he’s just chucked up everything and gone off to some love-nest.’

  ‘But why on earth should ’e take the bathroom curtains to a love-nest?’ said Bedd. He had heard some rummy things, but this beat all.

  ‘May be he had a fetish about seagulls,’ suggested Charlesworth.

  Sergeant Bedd who had always vaguely understood that a fetish was them little round hats worn by the blacks in Africa, looked more mystified than ever.

  Down at Elysian Hall, Mr. Port, Susan Betchley and Motherdear hung miserably about the stage. ‘Well, well, I always heard that the murderer returns to the scene of the crime,’ said Charlesworth cheerfully, arriving there after a scrappy lunch at the pub opposite. ‘None of you people seem able to keep away. I shall begin to think that this was a mass slaying: a slaying by a mass, I mean, not a mass of people getting slain.’ Inspector Cockrill, standing between Peppi and a much-subdued Brian Two-Times, observed to himself with sardonic satisfaction that his colleague was covering up, with a lot of rather frantic badinage, the fact that he did not know what on earth to do next. With any luck, Detective Inspector Charlesworth was going to ‘make a muck’ of the Jezebel case! Until, of course, he, Cockie, the despised, the rejected, stepped in to put things straight for him…

  ‘I called at your house,’ said Brian, to Perpetua. ‘I thought perhaps ass I am not a villain you might have had lonch with me.’

  ‘I had lunch with Inspector Cockrill, Brian, and he brought me on down here. But I got the flowers and they were simply heaven. And I’m sorry I was so stupid about—sort of suspecting you. It was because of the white cloak and the voice and things…’

  ‘I look after you now, Peppi,’ said Brian comfortably.

  Charlesworth took Mr. Port to one side. ‘I’m most frightfully sorry about your wife, Mr. Port. That blasted woman…’

  ‘The damage is done, Inspector,’ said Mr. Port, quietly and bitterly. ‘She had to be put back to bed. God knows how long it will take now.’

  ‘I swear to you that she was perfectly O.K. with me. I didn’t ask her anything, I didn’t tell her anything, we just had a friendly talk…’

  ‘A friendly talk about my affairs in Malaya and about Isabel Drew and the exhibition: what I’ve worked and striven and prayed and payed to keep away from her all this time…’ He broke off, and went if possible whiter than he already was. ‘I mean—payed out these big sums to that nursing home to keep her there, away from the world… It’s been an anxiety: her mind is so delicately balanced…’ He added with bitter satisfaction: ‘Anyway, it may interest you to know that your visit to my wife to-day has just about sunk any hope you ever had of discovering anything about this crime.’

  Charlesworth let it go at that: no use making the little man angrier and more savage by ill-timed questions. He turned his entire attention back to the scene before him. Such fingerprints and footmarks as had been found had confirmed the stories of the suspects, as far as those went: Miss Betchley had certainly hammered and rattled at the Assembly room door, Brian Bryan had certainly admitted her from the inside: it was humanly impossible to have manipulated the inner bolt from outside the door. Earl Anderson in his blundering exit would have had on the chain mail gloves, (of knitted silver tape) which all the knights wore with their armour, giving a highly romantic effect and one devastating to the tracing of fingerprints: but there was a mark of Mr. Port’s pudgy palm as he had pushed the door open from outside and come hurrying through after Isabel’s fall. There were no significant prints in the dressing room where Perpetua had been locked up: but there again, her assailant would have worn the silver gloves. Charlesworth addressed the little group. ‘I expect you’d all like to know whether there’s any news of Earl Anderson. Well, there isn’t. He left his flat night before last—the evening before the evening of the murder, that is, of course, and, except for his having been seen here in the pageant, he hasn’t been heard of again. He seems to have taken a suitcase of things with him—or somebody has taken it to give us the impression of flight. The question more or less boils down to this: has Anderson been done away with himself-—or is he the murderer?’

  To this question, nobody appeared ready with a reply. Perpetua said: ‘But what motive could Earl have had to be a murderer? He had nothing on earth against Isabel Drew.’

  Motherdear stood unhappily wrangling with his own conscience: to speak or not to speak? Above the muted din of the exhibition, the voice of his love rose cool and clear: ‘Earl wouldn’t have killed poor Isabel. Earl wasn’t brutal like that, he wasn’t cold and calculating and cruel…’ And in the big empty room, the twelve suits of armour hung, watching them—watching him, poor muddled, unhappy, desperate George Exmouth, with their blind and steady gaze. He blurted out the ugly truth. ‘Earl Anderson was calculating and cruel: he was—going to ask you to marry him, Perpetua. And he was married already.’

  Perpetua’s face flushed. ‘It isn’t true.’

  ‘It’s true all right,’ he said. ‘I heard them planning it: him and Isabel Drew.’ That was the man who had held Perpetua in his arms! Would she defend him after that? But his heart was sick and heavy at the look of horror he had brought to her face. He said wretchedly: ‘But you needn’t be unhappy any more, Perpetua. They’re both dead now.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ said Charlesworth, quickly. ‘How do you know that Anderson’s dead? If anything, this gives him a motive to kill—not to get himself killed!’

  ‘Wishful thinking,’ suggested Cockie, eyeing the boy’s face with uneasiness.

  George Exmouth looked terrified. ‘I—I just thought…’

  But Charlesworth had lost interest in Motherdear: who, after all, had simply sat his horse from beginning to end of the whole affair, apparently unobserving, observed of none. He concentrated on the missing Anderson, now so handily supplied with Motive. ‘He packed a suitcase and spent the night before the murder somewhere other t
han his home: why I don’t quite see, but possibly to build up a new metier for himself not too closely associated with the actual evening of the crime. He got down here very late, changed into his armour, probably in one of the dressing rooms or out in the stalls, since nobody saw him actually putting it on, and then hung about in the corridor waiting for Miss Kirk. He pushed her into the little room, tied her up in the cloak and locked her in.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that was Earl—imitating Brian?’

  ‘Off course this fellow woss an actor,’ suggested Brian, shrugging.

  ‘And why lock me up, anyway?’

  Charlesworth had no idea. ‘Some vague notion of keeping you out of the way while he got up to his tricks: it was your job to sort of keep an eye on the knights, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Mine and Miss Betchley’s.’

  ‘But he knew Miss Betchley would be busy on the door.’

  Mr. Port started to say something, but held his peace. ‘So he went on into the Assembly room,’ continued Charlesworth. ‘Left his horse standing—it was a circus trained beast, it would have stood still—and slipped through the crowd and into the tower and… Well, went into the tower.’

  ‘But wouldn’t Isabel have seen him coming?’ said Peppi.

  ‘What if she did? It was only old Earl, the childhood pal. And anyway, he may have been hidden up on the platform: it would be pretty dark, and she wasn’t supposed to turn on the light because of its being seen through the window. She seems always to have gone up the ladder just by the light coming through the window itself and the door. And then…’

  ‘And then,’ said Inspector Cockrill sweetly, ‘he strangled her and threw her down, in such a way that twelve minutes later when he had been cavorting about on a horse for some time, beneath the gaze of all, she should have the appearance of having only that moment been strangled and thrown down. A talented fellow.’

  Collusion then. But with whom? Everybody else had been on the stage: except of course for Susan Betchley and Mr. Port—oh, and Perpetua. Why or how any of them should have wanted to collude with Earl Anderson in the murder of Isabel, it was not easy to suggest: but supposing they had? Miss Betchley undertook to say that neither Mr. Port nor Perpetua had remained in the Assembly room. Supposing for the sake of argument they had either of them dressed up in the spare uniform, and gone in so disguised, unbeknown to her? But how then had they gone out again? There had been no one, in armour or otherwise, in the tower or Assembly room when she had burst in after Isabel’s fall: the spare armour had dangled on its hook half-way down one wall, its helmet hanging on the peg above the hook. Supposing that, Anderson having murdered the girl and gone back to his horse, Miss Betchley had crept in, waited for the psychological moment and thrown the body down. But no: for Isabel would have been dead then long before she hit the ground, and the postmortem tale of bruises made within a few seconds of death was too definite for that. And anyway, Brian Bryan had found the door bolted from the inside, so that Miss Betchley could not have gone through. And anyway, why wait and throw her down?

  And anyway, why the two nooses?

  ‘Too much standing about here,’ suggested Brian Two-Times to Perpetua, weary with the self-communings of the stupid British police. ‘Better I take you to the Exhibitors’ Club for some tea.’

  The Exhibitors’ Club was a large, square room furnished with basket-work chairs in which it was impossible to do anything but lie down or sit bolt upright, and round glass-topped tables with—on the second day of the exhibition—a good deal of pale brown fluid already staining to leprous patches the violently pink paper between the wooden table and its covering glass. The Club owed its membership almost entirely to the fact that its sanitary arrangements were slightly more civilized than those of the rest of the exhibition. By three o’clock there was no cake left, tea-cake was also ‘off’, buttered toast had never been on. ‘Come home and I’ll make you a cup of tea in my room,’ said Perpetua, to prevent Brian Two-Times from rising up and laying about him in his impotent rage at all this apparently studied frustration. ‘I’m afraid the tea-cake is off there too, but at least I won’t solemnly write down an order for it when I know all the time that it’s crossed off the menu with nasty indelible pencil.’

  ‘Is this correct, that I shall go in England to a yong lady’s flat?’

  ‘It’s even worse than a yong lady’s flat, it’s a bed-sitting-room,’ said Peppi, laughing. ‘But this is London, and 1947, and Cockie says I can trust you—I’ve got it in writing!’ She tucked her hand into his arm. ‘Or are you afraid?’

  ‘It is you who are no longer afraid, Perpetua, I am glad to see,’ said Brian Bryan: and his blue eyes shone.

  Inspector Cockrill remained on the stage with Charlesworth. ‘In this matter of Anderson’s being the murderer—aren’t you overlooking that poem? And the diamond brooch?’

  ‘They aren’t necessarily concerned with the murder at all.’

  Cockie raised his eyebrows. ‘I should have thought that everything that happened within an hour or so of the murder might at least have commanded your interest.’

  ‘We don’t know that anything happened within an hour of the murder. Isabel Drew may have had that brooch for years: she may have carried the poem around with her for years.’

  ‘Next to her heart?’ said Cockie.

  ‘Well, she may. Girls do these things.’

  ‘Not Jezebel,’ said Cockie.

  ‘Well, all right, let’s say that Anderson gave her the brooch then, within an hour of the murder: as you put it…

  ‘I don’t suggest that Anderson gave it to her: I suggest that she received it. If it was to be handed to her, why the poem? Why the mystery? Say she received the poem: and the brooch.’

  Charlesworth shrugged. ‘Well, O.K. Then what? She puts the poem down her front, pins the brooch into her dress, and gets on with the job in hand. Up the tower, glances out of the window and registers gratitude in the general direction of the Knight upon her left…’

  ‘By doing what?’ said Cockrill: gently leading the child along through his class by the hand.

  ‘Well, sort of leaning over a bit…’

  ‘Wouldn’t the audience have seen that?’

  ‘No, because the balcony was in darkness. But the Knight was just beneath it, looking up.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then his arms suddenly grew about ten feet and he reached up and pulled her down and laid her on the ground at his feet and strangled her,’ said Charlesworth, hopelessly.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Cockie.

  Charlesworth stood staring at him. And suddenly was galvanized into action. ‘Everybody off the stage, please. Screens up, Bedd, please. Some rope—I want some rope: here, those bits of thick string there will do.’ He disappeared with it, and reappeared shortly afterwards at the window of the tower, reaching out, feeling among the green metal ivy-leaves. ‘Yes: there are hundreds of nails here.’ He called down to Cockie: ‘Why the second noose?’

  ‘I suggested last night that it was all very confusing,’ said Cockie.

  “Deliberate, you mean? Second one to put us off the scent of the first. Where would you hide a leaf, in the forest,’ gabbled Charlesworth gaily. He tied the string into a slip noose and hitched it lightly over three nails so that it hung down, half framing the narrow window. The second length of string, tied to the first to make a total of somewhere around ten feet, hung down one side of the arch, to the left of the window as he faced out. He disappeared and came back on to the stage.

  Bedd stood staring at the two shining faces. ‘You mean to say that he lured her to look out: and then put up his hand, like, to the switch. And the noose come off the nails: and closed round her neck—and he give a tug, and brought her down? But, ’ere!’ His brow was furrowed, he shook his grizzled head. ‘You’re going too fast, Mr. Charlesworth, sir, begging your pardon. The doctor said she was strangled from behind with two hands, not a minute from when she hit the floor: and that’s flat.’
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br />   ‘You’ll be flat, you old image, if you don’t hold your tongue.’ He stood up on the horse’s block and reached up and gave the string a jerk. It came away easily from its nails and lay coiled in a heap on the ground. ‘You lie down here with it, Bedd, and don’t talk so much: you’ve just fallen fifteen feet.’ He said to Cockrill: ‘That’s what you meant—isn’t it?’

  ‘It was what the poem and the brooch suggested,’ acknowledged Cockie. He ran over the poem once again. “‘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!” Of course, as I said, there are two or three other ways.’

  Charlesworth could not be bothered with the two or three other ways. ‘Now: I’m the Red Knight on his horse, sitting up here like a stuck pig, having pulled the girl down. The White Knight’s in a bit of trouble, but I’d taken all that into my calculations: they say a horse never steps on a body, and this one didn’t either. He bolted forward, and that was the White Knight out of the way. I waited another second or two: and then I got down off my horse and came over and knelt down by poor, dear Isabel. My cloak flowed out about me and hid my hands…’

  ‘Hoy, sir,’ said Sergeant Bedd in a gurgling voice; ‘you’re straglig be!’

  ‘Right bang there in front of the audience,’ said Charlesworth, in a tone of awe. He stood up and, fresh from the business of strangling Sergeant Bedd, dusted his hands together fastidiously.

  ‘And ME in the front row,’ said Inspector Cockrill. Awe was not the word for it.

  ‘Unhooked the ropes, tucked them out of sight under her skirt and blundered, stupefied with sorrow, out through the arch!’