‘I see,’ said Cockrill, slowly. He prompted: ‘And then she fell.’
‘And then she fell,’ said Mr. Port. His pudgy cheeks shook like jellies at the thought of it. ‘I was petrified, I sat there on my horse, staring: nobody moved, nobody did a thing, it seemed like hours. I didn’t realize that she was dead, of course: God knows I never dreamed that she’d been murdered. I thought she’d just fallen over the balcony: fainted perhaps, I don’t know what I thought… At last I came-to a bit, somebody had to do something and I got down and went to her and turned her over. Till that moment, I swear no thought of myself had come into my head.’
‘But you saw at once that she was dead?’
He looked like a poor little mole sitting there in his brown summer suiting, with his little hands clasped before his rounded breast. ‘Her face was so terrible! Yes—I realized that she was dead. I was pretty sure she was dead. I turned her over, very carefully and then I saw my brooch in her dress, and sticking up out of the neck of her silver gown, a piece of white paper. I realized at once what she had done: she had picked them both up in the tower, and having nothing else to do with it, she had thrust the note down the front of her dress. All of a sudden it came to me that it would be found there and if there was an enquiry into the accident—as I thought it—everything would come out. So I tried to take the note. My cloak was all round me, nobody could see what my hands were doing. I tried to pull the paper out; but the pin of the brooch was through it, I couldn’t get it free. I was frightened. I got up, and stood back looking down at her: and I realized how serious it was all going to be. The papers would get hold of the silly little verse, and my poor wife—’ He broke off, wretchedly. ‘It came to me that nobody knew I was there: nobody could recognize me. I staggered away as though I were too upset to bear it, and out in the stalls I scrambled out of the armour and I came back pretending that I had been in the audience.’ He looked at Cockrill anxiously. ‘You do believe me?’
‘The question is,’ said Cockie, ‘will Inspector Charlesworth believe you?’
‘You don’t think—you don’t imagine he’ll still think that I pulled her down and—and killed her?’
‘There’s no saying what he’ll believe,’ said Cockie, sourly.
Mr. Port clasped his little paws. ‘But you’ll tell him for me, Inspector: you’ll convince him that there was nothing criminal, you’ll explain everything—he can’t but see how well it all hangs together, he can’t but realize that every word I say is true?’ He beat with his folded hands against his own breast. ‘You’ll tell him Inspector, won’t you? You’ll tell him for me?’
‘What exactly do you want me to say?’ said Cockie, cautiously. ‘Why—that I was the Red Knight,’ said Mr. Port.
And at the Yard itself Miss Betchley, having sat the prescribed ten minutes on the green bench, wilting in the sun, now poured forth her soul to Inspector Charlesworth. ‘I want to tell you the truth, I want to confess the truth, that I killed Earl Anderson and I killed Isabel…’ She sat on the edge of the wooden chair in the little office and clasped her hands before her on the clip of her bag. She had a strange white look about the eye-sockets, and the bones of the knuckles were pearly against her brown hands. She said: ‘I know that you don’t think I could have done it, Mr. Charlesworth: but the simple truth is this—that I was the Red Knight.’
Mr. Charlesworth did not know as yet of the rush for the position of the Red Knight. He listened attentively, his eyes on her troubled face. ‘I killed Anderson, Inspector. It was all just as you worked it out: of course I have no alibi for that time. Next day it was Isabel’s turn. I knew of course that Anderson was dead: I took his place. That was what I had planned. I joined the knights when they rode through the arch and took his part in the pageant. I was out on the stage all the way through. I pulled Isabel down with the ropes and strangled her: and then I blundered away through the Assembly room. It would all have been terribly simple: I should have gone through to the Assembly room, slipped out of the armour while they were all bewildered and doing nothing, and gone to my post on the other side of the door. Then I’d have appeared, saying that the Red Knight had come blundering out and—what on earth had happened? But there was a mishap. The body fell on the tail of the white horse and it came bolting through. I stood, as you worked it out, huddled against the wall, in my astonishment: and if Mr. Bryan saw me before he tumbled off his horse, he thought I was a suit of armour, propped up there. It wasn’t a question of the spare suit being used: it was me in Earl Anderson’s armour. But Mr. Bryan got knocked out by his fall: and when I saw that, I went on and got rid of the armour out in the horses’ stalls and hurried back and began hammering at the door. It was easy to convince him that it was bolted on his side: he was dazed, and he believed what I said—he still thinks that it was bolted, he thinks that it came from him that the door was bolted—but I put the idea into his head when he was too stupid to understand. Everything else was just as you’ve worked it out. I’d taken the ropes off when I strangled Isabel, and pushed them under her skirt. That’s all.’
Perpetua had said that she heard whistling all through the earlier part of the pageant: had heard Miss Betchley whistling ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’. But Peppi had been through a bad experience just before, she had been found in a fainting condition: was it necessary that she had been conscious at all, was it not possible that she had been knocked-out and dreaming during the first ten minutes? It now seemed possible that it might be so. Charlesworth said: ‘Why do you come to me now, with this confession?’
She shrugged. ‘My job’s done. I wanted to kill them both, and I have killed them. I thought I might get away with it and maybe I could have. But having done it, inspector, I find I don’t want to get away with it. I don’t care any more, I have nothing to live for or bother about any more.’ She gave him a lop-sided little smile. ‘You protected me yesterday: you said I wasn’t a man—and I’m not. But, Inspector—why does everybody assume that Johnny Wise’s twin was a boy?’
‘You are Johnny Wise’s twin?’ said Charlesworth.
She raised her head. ‘I’m Johnny Wise’s twin sister: and I was the Red Knight!’
On their bench in the park Brian Two-Times and Perpetua sat idly in the shade—not holding hands because it was so hot. Perpetua told Brian about the night’s adventure. ‘Now, in the broad daylight, I see of course, Brian, that it must have been all nonsense. The poor kid wanted to make himself important. But last night—one hasn’t much sense of proportion in the early hours of the morning, has one?—and I felt so helpless and frightened and all alone…’
‘I am your protector, Peppi: you are not frightened if I look after you?’
‘But you can’t look after me in the night, Brian, can you?’ said Perpetua plaintively: not really thinking.
Brian Two-Times looked as if that were just too bad.
They decided to go and get some lunch and got up off the bench and Brian collected his mackintosh and the black hat and was with difficulty restrained from putting them on, because an English gentleman surely would not walk about in Town without a hat and coat? He consented, however, to hang the mac over his arm and walk along twirling the hat on the bunched fingers of one hand. An envelope was jerked out of a pocket by this vigorous twiddling and he stopped and picked it up. ‘Oh, lord—a letter comes for me to-day to my digs and I put it in my pocket and forgot all about it. Such a hurry to see you, Perpetua, eh?’ He turned it over in his fingers. ‘Express Messenger too! Oh dear! Who then is this letter from?’
‘Open it and see,’ said Peppi. (Rather sweet of Brian Two-Times to forget his morning’s post in his hurry to come and see her!)
Brian tore it open with a hooked finger. ‘Susan Betchley? Why then she writes to me?’ As he hastily scanned the close lines, he said now and again: ‘“My God! My God! Oh, this woman!’ And when he was finished, folded the note and thrust it into his pocket: and his blue eyes were a million million miles away. He came back with a start to t
he London park and Perpetua. ‘Peppi—sorry, I must leave you. I must go now to Scotland Yard. I must tell that Charlesworth…’
‘To Scotland Yard?’ said Perpetua, astounded. ‘To tell Mr. Charlesworth something? But Brian—all of a sudden like this—what?’
‘That I woss the Red Knight,’ said Brian, and left her abruptly, striding away through the park with his bounding step.
Charlesworth gathered them all together in his office at the Yard: four contestants for the enviable position of Red Knight in a game of murder. Inspector Cockrill stood by to see fair play. Brian Two-Times cast his black hat upon Charlesworth’s desk and his mackintosh over the back of a chair and confronted them, blue eyes ablaze. ‘Well—now—I confess to these silly murders! This good lady—she hass upset my apple cart with her fine confessions.’ But at sight of her stricken face, he went over to her, and took her brown hand in his. ‘You meant for the best: but do you think I would let you confess to a murder to let me go free?’ He addressed them all, and while he spoke he kept her hand in his. ‘This morning she sent me a letter: but I am in a hurry, I think nothing much of it and put it in my pocket. Just now I read the note. She has been thinking all night: sitting up writing all night. The heat has gone to her head—I think it has gone to all our heads. She tells me. “I loff you!”’ He raised her hand for a half-second to his lips. ‘For this—thank you, mad’moiselle: it is something for any man to be proud of. But, she says, she thinks I love somebody else: to love this lady also would be something to be proud of.’ He bowed in homage to an absent Perpetua. Cockie thought that if he would cut the cackle and come to the hosses he would really have something to be proud of after all. But the pieces of the puzzle were clicking like magic into their places: and the central figure stood firm.
Brian Two-Times came to the hosses. ‘She says that she knows that I am the murderer: she has known it from the first. She says that she realizes now that I am the brother of Johnny Wise. Johnny Wise had two brothers and a sister and a father and a mother. One brother was his twin: and the other brother was older than the twins—and I am that brother. My name was Bryant—not Brian: but I changed it when I came over here to murder Isabel Drew and Earl Anderson, and called myself Brian Bryan—Brian Two-Times as Issabel used to say. All this Miss Betchley did not know: she only guessed. What she knew was this…’ He swung round upon her. ‘Tell them!’ he said.
‘It is all lies,’ she protested. ‘He’s doing this to protect me.’
Inspector Cockrill thought he had never seen so many people protecting each other in all his born days: but this was the real McCoy. He leaned forward, keenly interested; and a huge piece of the puzzle was settled in, once and for all. He waved the interruption aside. ‘Go on, go on!’ Once they started on another exchange of compliments heaven knew when it would end.
Brian went on. ‘What she knew was this. She told you all that when the White Knight sat on his horse in his armour ten minutes before the pageant, she went up and spoke to him. That was true. But what she did not say was that he did not answer her. What she said called for no answer: she wished the White Knight luck or some such thing, and moved on about her work. When she said this, I seized upon it: I used it later, I said that she had talked with me. That was not true. To speak to a person and to talk with a person are two different things. Miss Betchley spoke to the White Knight seated on his white horse: but nobody answered her. And for a very simple reason—there was nobody there.’
Sensation. But Cockie had had it all worked out long ago. ‘You had trained the horse to go round with the empty armour on his back?’
‘I am used to horses,’ said Brian. ‘Yes, I trained him. I tried him several times: several times he has done that pageant alone: after all, he is a circus horse. If anything went wrong—if anyone had found out at the “rehearsals”—what harm? I am having a joke with everybody, I am pulling the leg of our good Mr. Port.’ He was obviously about to bow to Mr. Port. ‘Go on, go on,’ said Cockie.
‘So the night comes. Anderson is dead—and now Issabel must die: Issabel or Jessabel which ever you like to call her. For me, she is Jessabel. I saw it all when first she introduced me to the pageant. The Tower! It was a pretty piece of justice: it was the finishing touch, an exquisite coincidence. As Jezebel she had lived: as Jezebel died, so she should die.’ His blue eyes blazed with a desperate sincerity: and for the first time, Cockrill thought: I believe the fellow’s a little mad.
He seemed to have forgotten them all. He spoke staring straight ahead of him with the heaven-blue eyes. ‘I killed Anderson. This also was to avenge my brother, but it served a useful purpose: it left free the Red Knight’s place in the pageant. I saddled my horse and placed my armour on it and gave the horse a whack: and in it went, and took up its position and patiently waited there. Meanwhile I changed into the Red Knight’s armour and waited until the last minute so that nobody could question me: but Miss Kirk was wandering about hurrying up the knights, and I was afraid she would spot something. I turned my cloak inside out, so that only the white lining showed, and I pushed her into the little room and locked her there. I did not mean to hurt her and I did not: but murder was on my mind, and she was dangerous to my plans.’ He stopped. Cockie thought: Two minutes silence now, in respect for Miss Kirk!
‘So I rode through,’ he went on, ‘and took my place as the Red Knight. The white horse took an empty suit of armour through the routine. And when the time came, I jerked the rope and down she came, and I dismounted and bent over her—and strangled her. But to my horror—things went wrong. The white horse bolted into the Assembly room. I decided I must follow it. I registered deep grief and got myself off the stage. Once in the Assembly room, I ran to the outer door and bolted it. Then I took off the red cloak and put on the white one that the empty armour had worn. Miss Betchley hammered at the door and I ran to open it: I think I put up a good imitation of a man dazed by a fall from his horse. We went through to the stage.’
Charlesworth digested it all in silence. He said, at last: ‘But there was a second man. What about the knight in armour that passed you and Miss Betchley on his way out?—whom you both called up to now, the Red Knight?’
Brian held tightly to Miss Betchley’s hand. ‘There was no second man. Miss Betchley was astounded and bewildered by all that was happening so fast. We hurry through the room to the stage: she does not know what horror she will find there. We pass, it is true, a suit of armour by the wall: when I suggest into her mind that a knight has passed us, she does not think, she takes what I say for the fact. Later, perhaps, she doubts: but by then she has observed something which she did not mention at the time—that the knight on the white horse did not answer her. And…’ He paused. He said: ‘She is so kind as to say that she—likes me a little. She realizes: she knew my poor Johnny—she knows what a boy he was—thiss golden boy!—she knows these people in their own way have murdered him. She sees me not as a murderer but as an executioner. She keeps silence.’ He bowed to her again.
And with the bow, the last piece clicked into place. The figure of the murderer in the centre—the figure that had been there all along: the Knight in the red cloak or in the white cloak, which ever way you cared to regard him—Brian Bryan, a little mad, a little unbalanced by events under the régime of the Japanese, brooding for years in his concentration camp over the wrongs of his brother, ‘this golden boy’. There were details here and there, in the background, little inconsistencies in the shapes of the supporting pieces of the puzzle—but here was the pattern of the whole thing clearly in shape—a flower-banked stage, a castellated wall, a cardboard tower, a foolish little balcony: glare of floodlights, upward shifting, ten knights in shining armour and flowing coloured cloaks, one suit of armour empty on a white horse with a white cloak… Cockrill remembered the tiny mounting of the heart one had felt at their first entry: jingling, jangling through the arch, right out of a fairy-book picture in childhood days—jingling, jangling through the arch, standards astream, cloa
ks flying, armour gleaming… Through the arch and straight down the stage towards him as he stood there in the audience: bright light focused on the leading knight, so bright that… So bright that…
The puzzle scattered into a hundred pieces: the central figure was flung from its place and lay uncertainly on the heap. The sky caved in, the scene collapsed, the pattern was a kaleidoscope of colour without form. Cockrill got up slowly out of his chair. He pointed at Brian Bryan a thin finger stained mahogany brown by the smoke of countless cigarettes. He said: ‘The whole thing’s a fabrication from start to finish. You were no more the Red Knight than I was. You were the White Knight: and if you were the White Knight, you couldn’t have killed Isabel Drew. You are not a murderer. I can prove it myself.’ And he turned to Charlesworth and said: ‘He rode down towards me on the white horse, wearing the silver armour, holding the white standard, with the white cloak flying. The light flooded full upon him. His visor was up.’ And he looked into those twin pools of blue and dragged it out of himself reluctantly: the central piece of the wonderful pattern of the puzzle. ‘I saw his eyes,’ he said.
Chapter XIII
AND SO SUSAN BETCHLEY had made her heroic gesture: and Motherdear had made his heroic gesture, and Mr. Port had made his heroic gesture and Brian Bryan had made his. And Inspectors Cockrill and Charlesworth, propping up a shiny bar in a shiny pub chosen by Charlesworth, were for once in complete agreement—they could have slain the lot of them.
‘I thought we had him,’ said Charlesworth, putting back a pint and asking the dazzling barmaid for the same again. ‘But of course if you say he definitely was on that white horse…’
‘The whole thing is a lot of nonsense,’ said Cockie, not using the word nonsense. ‘He made it up as he went along. The white horse was not carrying an empty armour: I saw his eyes as he rode towards me. And he was not the Red Knight. Remember what young Exmouth said…’
Death of Jezebel Page 17
