Dancing Death

by Christopher Bush

  Travers grunted, then frowned. “I say, that’s bad! You see the point, George?”

  Paradine hoisted himself up in the chair and looked round. “If Pollock looked in the room, then I do.”

  “He looked in all right,” said Braishe. “He had a lighted candle.”

  “Exactly! She was under the bed—where we found her. That means she was definitely murdered when the lights were out—and before Pollock got there.”

  “And it may mean,” Travers added quietly, “that the lights were put out so that she could be murdered! There was just the chance, of course, that she was elsewhere when Pollock looked in: the bathroom, for instance.”

  “She wasn’t there. Pollock says it was empty.”

  They stood thinking that over for a minute, then Paradine cleared his throat. “There’s something you ought to know, Martin. Your aunt says she distinctly saw a harlequin come down the side stairs past Mirabel’s door, just after the light went out. Tommy proves it wasn’t him; your aunt says it wasn’t you!”

  “Says she saw a harlequin. But it’s—er—ridiculous! I was downstairs at the time!”

  “Exactly. But she says she’s certain. There weren’t any other harlequins, were there?”

  Braishe shook his head. Travers cut in quickly with a suggestion.

  “This is what I think we ought to do—if only to satisfy Celia. George’ll pardon my saying so, but she’s bound to persist in her attitude if we don’t make her prove herself wrong. Why shouldn’t Martin and Tommy put on those costumes and let Celia have a look at ’em under the same conditions? We can use candlelight on the back staircase to represent moonlight—what little there was. You agree, Martin? You, Tommy? Then, if George’ll tell Celia, we’ll make a start.”

  In a quarter of an hour the stage was set. Most of the time was spent in approximating that light to the merest glimmer that had penetrated the narrow corridor from the staircase window. But as soon as Travers marshalled his two harlequins and put them through their paces across the landing something went wrong. Even when the motions as described by her were done with exaggerated slowness, she was wrong in her guesses.

  “Who was that one?” Travers would sing out. Celia would have a shot, which might be right. The trouble was, it was just as often wrong. Moreover, as she finally had to confess, the lucky guesses were based rather on what might be called a fortuitous intuition than on a definite recognition of the patterns of the costumes. After that they switched on the light and held the inquest on the top landing.

  Travers gave what he imagined was a roguish smile.

  “Well, Celia, what about it now?”

  Celia protested volubly. Whatever they said, she’d seen a man who’d worn a harlequin costume. She’d swear to that anywhere. She’d caught the lozenge pattern.

  “Then there must have been heaps of white or yellow in it!”

  “Perhaps there was. There must have been!” This very triumphantly.

  “But there must have been some dark,” went on Travers, “or you’d never have seen the pattern. You’d have thought it was a ghost!”

  Celia was not amused. “I don’t see there’s any point in making a mock of tragic things.”

  “Sorry!” said Travers. “I simply meant it couldn’t have been all white or yellow. But you’re sure it wasn’t Tommy—or his costume—you saw?”

  “Well, apparently it couldn’t have been!” Travers smiled to himself at the regret in her voice. “But he did smooth his hair back as Mr. Wildernesse does!”

  There was a moment’s silence, then Braishe saved Travers the trouble, by using the words he’d have used himself. “But that’s something I do pretty frequently too!”

  “That’s right!” cut in Wildernesse, then, “I’m sorry! I didn’t intend to—”

  “What’s it matter?” Travers laughed cheerfully. “It wasn’t Tommy—and it wasn’t Martin.”

  “It certainly wasn’t!” added George bluntly. “We know where both of them were.” He turned to Travers. “It was a burglar. That’s who it was!”

  “What was a burglar doing in Mr. Wildernesse’s room?” Celia asked imperiously.

  Tommy was as quiet as a pup that’s had an unpleasant experience with a seasoned veteran of a cat. Braishe came to the rescue.

  “He might have been doing anything, Aunt Celia. It’s pretty dark in those corners, you know.”

  “Do you know,” said Travers, “I’m inclined to think that burglar planned pretty well. All the district knew the dance was on, and there’d be plenty of local gossip about the house being full of people. So he came prepared. He wore a harlequin costume. You’ll admit he had nothing to do but slip in the front door. He intended to go through the bedrooms while the dance was on; then, if he’d been seen by the servants, he’d have been unsuspected. That early breaking up of the party—before the official supper, when everybody’d have been downstairs—rather upset his plans. He couldn’t get away because of the road, so he lay low.”

  “Yes—but why the harlequin costume?”

  “Exactly!” Celia gave a nod of full agreement. “And why did he go to Mr. Wildernesse’s room?”

  Travers was enjoying it. “He chose a harlequin costume because he hoped he’d be right—and he was right. Whoever heard of a fancy-dress ball without a harlequin! We’ve even got a couple in the house—and we’re only six men! I know what you’re going to say—that none of the guests had them. That’s because you didn’t give me a chance to couple pierrots with harlequins. There were at least two pierrots, you know! But about going to Tommy’s room—there I’m as much in the dark as everybody. He might have heard something upstairs and thought he’d shift his quarters.”

  He left them there, arguing it out, and made his way back to the breakfast room. In the hall he met Pollock.

  “I’ve found those copies of The Times you were asking for, sir. They’re on your dressing-room table, sir.”

  Travers thanked him and was passing on, then had an idea.

  “Oh, Pollock! Ask Ransome—Miss Quest’s maid—to come to the breakfast room, will you?”

  He stoked the fire again and drew a chair up to the table. There was something distinctly unpleasant about that maid—not the fact that she was forty if a day and looked as if she were perpetually guarding a certain arid virginity, but some furtiveness of look that went badly with the smug servility which she cultivated. If his judgment were correct, she was about as much to be trusted as a female rattlesnake. For all that, he laid himself out to be pleasant.

  “How’re you feeling now, Ransome? Quite recovered?”

  “Yes, sir . . . thank you.”

  “It must have been a pretty awful shock to you,” he went on. “Had you been with Miss Quest very long?”

  “Two years, sir. In Parlour Tricks at the Publicity was where I was with her first.”

  “I remember it—a very good show! But, tell me, now. Did she even hint to you this last day or two anything about this dreadful business? Was there anybody she was afraid of, for instance?”

  “No, sir . . . not that I know of.”

  “Hm!” For all its patness, the answer didn’t ring very true. Then he looked straight at her: six foot two down at five foot one. “Shall I tell you who I think might have killed her—if there’d been an opportunity?”

  This time there wasn’t any doubt in his mind. He saw the sudden start; he could almost see that cheap little brain of hers wondering just what he knew.

  “Who do you think that was?”

  She drew in a quick breath. “I don’t . . . don’t know, sir.”

  He smiled. “I was forgetting. You didn’t see that show she did for us last night. If you had, you’d have said that Beauty Sally’d have murdered her with all the pleasure in the world!” He shook his head sadly. “Miss Quest was a marvellous mimic, don’t you think so?”

  “Yes . . . she was, sir.”

  He nodded again, somewhat pontifically. “I suppose she didn’t by any chance ask you
to scribble a note for her last night while she was dressing for the show?”

  Her thin face coloured violently. “A note, sir?”

  “Yes. We found a note she was supposed to have written to . . . somebody, but it wasn’t in her handwriting. I wonder if you’d mind writing something for me on this sheet of paper.” He passed over his pen. “Just write these words. Happy. Foggy. Burning. Urgent. Lodge. Meeting.”

  He took the sheet, then nodded pleasantly. “As you say, it’s not your writing. Well, perhaps it wasn’t her note after all.”

  He let her go at that and sat for some minutes before the fire, thinking things over, and the more he thought, the less he liked it. Take Tommy Wildernesse, for instance, congratulating himself on having a perfect alibi. If Mirabel Quest was murdered within a minute or two of the lights going out, then he had no alibi at all! The statement that he was in the dining room, dodging Pollock, might be a carefully thought out prevarication. The very note—presumably from Mirabel—he might have written for himself, and the fact that Palmer had seen a note flicked across the room was no guarantee that it was the same one that Wildernesse had produced for their inspection. As for the statement that he himself would be prepared to make to the police—that Tommy Wildernesse was incapable of killing anyone—that would cut precious little ice. Mirabel had infuriated him; she’d cut him; she’d sneered at him, and she’d possibly made a fool of him—and under such circumstances people do strange things.

  As for Braishe, his alibi was worth precious little. When the lights went out he was on safe ground, and that gave him a start on Wildernesse. But after that his movements couldn’t be verified. Still, in his favour was the apparent absence of motive. Braishe and Mirabel—an incongruous enough couple in all conscience!—had seemed to get on amazingly well together. Then another idea. Braishe was a high stepper, and heaven knew what entanglements he might have got into.

  And lastly, with regard to those two harlequins, both had the best of all possible friends in Celia’s temperamental obstinacy. Lord knows what she had seen! It might have been a harlequin—and it might not; the great thing was she could swear to neither Braishe nor Wildernesse, whatever her prejudice against the latter. But assuming Celia had seen what she claimed—seen it perhaps with senses suddenly acute—then why had that harlequin crossed the landing from staircase to staircase? Why had he halted to make that gesture—and halted in spite of the fact that voices were coming from a few feet away? And if he’d done the murder, why hadn’t he bolted altogether while the darkness gave him a chance?

  That led him to Fewne. Where had he been during that vital couple of minutes? To go back for those balloons, as he himself had suggested, was a matter of seconds—not minutes. Had he gone mad before he left the house? Was that why Tommy Wildernesse heard him muttering away to himself? And in the vital interval, had he been gibbering away in some corner?

  Then he had another idea. Where had Fewne got that notion for a costume? Almost certainly he’d never chosen it for himself. Fewne’s taking an interest in anything so mundane as a costume seemed absurd, and if he had been faced with the problem of getting one, he’d have chosen the easiest way out by placing himself in the hands of some firm or other. Perhaps Braishe could give some information.

  The drawing room was deserted, and Travers retraced his steps to the dining room, where nobody but Charles was visible. The billiard room, perhaps—and he smiled to himself. Rather like Challis, that! At the top of the short staircase that led down to the basement room he heard the click of the balls. When he opened the door, there were Challis and Crashaw at it. Challis, in the act of striking, looked, for him, extraordinarily confused.

  “You don’t mind this, old boy?” he asked diffidently.

  “Why should I?” smiled Travers. “You can’t expect people to sit about all day like mutes. Only, if I were you—”

  “I know what you were going to say! Don’t let the old lady smell us out—what?”

  Travers smiled again. “Well, perhaps it’d be as well.”

  There was something disarming about the buoyant vulgarity of Challis. Travers rather liked him in a queer sort of way. He was so cocksure, for instance; so utterly human and rather like a sparrow. Clever enough, too, in his own way, in spite of the fact that a saloon bar represented his spiritual home. As for Crashaw, he was looking like one of his own boys—caught red-handed—as he put away his cue. Travers put in a consoling word.

  “Well, Crashaw, did you teach him how to play this game?”

  Crashaw smiled modestly. Challis completed the answer.

  “Tell you what, old boy: if I were this lad I’d give up school-mastering and take a pub!”

  “Wouldn’t mind a pub myself!” said Travers. “By the way, something I wanted to ask you. Do you happen to know why Fewne wore that balloon-seller costume? Simply a glorified hawker’s get-up and a set of balloons, wasn’t it?”

  “Do I know, old boy? Do I not! You see, I thought it might be a good idea—one idea leading to another, as they say—to try out a little number we’re probably putting on in the new show. The idea’s this. There’s a balloon seller standing at a corner. What corner? Any corner, old boy. Then a girl comes along and speaks, you know, ‘Poor old man; have you no home?’ and all that. Then enter Harlequin. He dances in the moonlight and sort of fascinates the girl; then they dance together with this melancholy-looking balloon seller in the background. Then the Harlequin gives the girl a wish—poorish sort of girl she is; down at heel, if you follow me, old boy—and she wishes she might be at a real ball—lights and music and so on. Then what happens, old boy, do you think?”

  “Lord knows! . . . She dies to soft music!”

  “You’re pulling my leg, old boy. She doesn’t die. She gets her wish. The lights dim out; the balloon seller’s set of balloons gets enormous; he backs stage, and before you know where you are the lights are on, the dance is in full swing—crowded stage, everybody talking and laughing like hell; first-class band; everything, old boy, just as she’d wished, and in the middle of it the balloons float out over the room—hundreds of ’em—and the music gets faster; lights kaleidoscopic, and so on, and that leads back to where we started from: lights dim out—moonlight—balloon seller and the girl at the corner again. We’re calling it ‘Bubbles.’ Damn good title, what? Rinnberg’s doing the music. . . . What do you think of it, old boy?”

  “Sounds rather original, don’t you think so, Crashaw?”

  “Yes . . . frightfully! Awfully ambitious, of course.”

  “Not for Challis!” smiled Travers. “He’s an ambitious bloke. However, to be serious; your idea was to try this out without any possibility of lighting effects, just to see if you could get any fresh ideas. You were trying it out on the dog, if I may say so.”

  “That’s right, old boy. The snow business rather put the lid on that. I’d thought of trying it out as a sort of grand finale, after the toast of the evening.”

  “You sent the costumes down?”

  “I did, old boy. Got the measurements, and so on. Broody said he’d get Fewne in the mind. Chap with a face like that was too good to be missed. Alfred Lester type, old boy, don’t you think so?—speaking well of the dead and all that.”

  “When did Fewne know about it all?”

  “Oh—er—fortnight ago or so. I understood he was rather bucked at the idea—not having to think out one for himself and so on.”

  “Good!” said Travers. “You’re an ingenious devil, you know, Challis. I shall have to come and see that show of yours.” He took an arm of each. “Now you two young people had better get fit for dinner. The first gong went ten minutes ago!”

  CHAPTER X

  THE DEVIL TO PAY

  DINNER was a quiet affair that night—just the five men to themselves, with an absence of tension but a strict avoidance of anything but the soberest geniality. The horrible novelty of the situation was wearing off and there were longer intervals between the sudden rememberings of what had h
appened a few hours before. Moreover, there was a further relief in prospect. The snow had definitely ceased, the wind had shifted slightly and Pollock—a reliable weather prophet, according to Paradine—was talking hopefully of rain. People were confidently thinking of town again in twenty-four hours, till Travers told them just how things stood.

  “Now Franklin’s got through to Great Levington, the police will rush a snow plough here in no time,” Wildernesse had remarked.

  “Don’t you believe it!” Travers told him. “Excuse my being blunt, but because a murder’s been done, that’s no reason for clearing the road regardless. A murder, however callous the statement may seem to us, means a dead person. The authorities have to think about the living: clearing the roads for the doctors and so on.”

  “And when the police do get here,” added Paradine, “they won’t let a soul leave the house till they’re satisfied. Then there’ll be the inquests—and the funerals.”

  “Nothing you’ve forgotten, old boy?” asked Challis plaintively. That caused the first smile for some minutes.

  Travers sat yarning till well after nine, then yawned and made his excuses. In the breakfast room Palmer was waiting, as arranged. Travers indicated a chair.

  “Now, let’s hear all about it. Keep your voice low. We don’t want to be overheard!”

  Palmer’s voice became a hoarse, unnatural whisper. “Where do you want me to start, sir?”

  “Anywhere you like. Say as soon as you got here. And for God’s sake, don’t bark!”

  Palmer thought for a moment. “The first was that unpleasantness before dinner, sir.”

  “Unpleasantness! You mean between Mrs. Fewne and Miss Quest?”

  “That’s it, sir. You see, sir, I happened to be coming down the back staircase to your room, sir, when I heard it. Excuse me, sir, but I wrote down this morning what I heard, in case I might forget it.” He produced a paper. “I was just turning the corner, sir, when I heard the first words, and it pulled me up short, sir, in a manner of speaking. It was Miss Quest’s voice I heard, sir—very shrill it was, sir, and sneering like. She was saying, sir,” Palmer consulted the paper, “And that’s you, you smug-faced hypocrite!’ Then she laughed, sir, very loud and spiteful; then she said, ‘Oh, my God! Isn’t it priceless!’ Then she roared with laughter, sir; then she said something as if she was mad with temper. ‘You cheap slut! You and your bloody sermons! Get out of here before I throw you out!’ or words to that effect, sir. So, thinking someone was coming out, I went by quickly and entered your room, sir.” Palmer drew a deep breath.