Dancing Death

by Christopher Bush

  “And what’s that?”

  “That Mrs. Fewne was terrified her husband should know she’d borrowed money.”

  “Hm! Hardly a murder motive, that!”

  “Exactly! But the whole of the obvious problem lies here—the doped drink, the cut cord, the murders, the suspects; the evidence—what there is of it—is all here.” He looked at Wharton with a disarming smile. “Well, what do you say?”

  “This,” said Wharton, less bluntly than it seemed. “You’re extraordinarily anxious to be let alone with that pagoda! You wouldn’t be sorry if I never set foot in it—except that you might want me to do some cross-examination for you! However,” and he gave Franklin a wink that Travers didn’t see, “we’ll try it out! I shall be up to my eyes for a day or so, merely getting hold of facts. Then there’ll be the inquests on Monday, and that’ll mean the chief characters away. Then there’ll be the funerals.”

  Franklin cut in there. “Knowing Ludo better than you do, George, I think all he wants is that whoever was responsible for the death of Fewne should think he’s got away with it. That’ll leave you free for all manner of—”

  “All right! All right!” Wharton waved his hand. “Haven’t I said I agree? . . . Hallo, here’s the medical evidence!”

  Menzies and Paradine seemed perfectly satisfied with what they’d done, and that was a feather in George Paradine’s cap, since the police surgeon wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get on with.

  “Had them both back where they were found?” asked Wharton.

  “Aye! Everything’s as Dr. Paradine found it—except the dagger—and you have that here.”

  “You leave that alone for a bit!” Wharton shot his hand out just in time. “There’s some pretty pictures to come off it yet.”

  “Is that so!” Menzies raised his eyebrows—and had his look all the same.

  “Finished?” asked Wharton. “Right! Then we’ll go upstairs for the photos there. We shan’t want you for a bit, Dr. Paradine, thanks.”

  Some time later Wharton and Franklin were standing in the pagoda. As Menzies had reported, the body had been taken there; not that Challis’s drawings were useless, but rather that they necessarily created no atmosphere. Now the body had gone again; this time to the ambulance, and the two were talking things over by the light of the acetylene lamp.

  “How’s it working out, George?”

  “Seems all right! It may be suicide.” He shook his head. “Don’t think I ever saw a more horrible sight!”

  Franklin nodded. It had been pretty ghastly.

  “Paradine’s sure enough—and Menzies doesn’t disagree. The curious thing is that what they find normal, Travers finds unusual.” He waved his hand at the writing desk. “Take that extraordinary scrawl, for instance, and compare Paradine’s and Travers’s theories. Take the manuscript. Travers says he’d never have committed suicide and left it as it is. He’d have burnt it first. Paradine says he was so mad that he forgot all about it.”

  “And. who are you backing?” Wharton asked quietly.

  “I?” He shrugged his shoulders; the reply was enigmatical. “Travers isn’t Braishe’s uncle—even by marriage!”

  “Come, come! Paradine’s an honourable man!”

  “Implicitly so. But honour and prejudice are different things.”

  “I know they are. But why Braishe? I see the contacts, of course: the gas, the fact that it’s his house, and so on. Also, there’s this dagger business—though Travers spoke before he knew that. But why did you mention Braishe?”

  “Because I know Travers,” said Franklin cryptically. “Sh! Here he is!”

  Travers came in with Tommy Wildernesse.

  “Frightfully cold out there. Freezing like sin! This is Tommy Wildernesse—Superintendent Wharton. Tommy’s a thundering good chap!”

  Wildernesse blushed as he shook hands. Travers explained.

  “I got him to have a look at something for me, just after we discovered the body—knowing he could keep a vital secret. Now, if you don’t mind, I want him to have another look. Put the lamp on the floor; just down here.” He pulled up the valance. “Now, Tommy, imagine you’re going to drain the sump of your car. Get on your back, wriggle under the bed and have a look where you did before.”

  Wildernesse did as directed and elbowed himself along. Travers chattered away as if to keep up the spirits of his new assistant.

  “Mind your head against that mattress! . . . Now, then! What about the joint between wall and floor?”

  “Can’t see it. I’m on my back!”

  “Damn it, of course you are! Roll over, then! . . . Now what do you see?”

  “Damn all!”

  “Good enough! . . . Come out again the way you went in!”

  “Is that all?” asked Wildernesse rather sheepishly when he’d dusted his knees.

  “That’s the lot, Tommy!” Travers told him. He turned to Wharton. “You can absolutely depend on him not to say a word about all this.”

  “Good!” said Wharton, who was feeling as if the conversation had been in Chinese. “I’m sure Mr. Wildernesse realizes the importance of it!”—and he might have added, “Which is a damn sight more than I do!” However, Travers saw his assistant off, had a word or two with him outside, then came back for the balloon to go up. It went up!

  “What’s the idea of this joint business, Mr. Travers?”

  “There isn’t any. I don’t give a damn what happens to the joint!”

  “I see. No sewerage or lighting connections with the main lighting or drainage?”

  Travers smiled, very apologetically. “Sorry! but if you’re thinking a pipe was tapped to let that gas in—you’re wrong! If you grub up this place by the foundations, you’ll find nothing. There isn’t a crack where gas could have been let in—Wildernesse’ll swear to that!” Travers was getting quite excited. “What’s more, I hope Braishe says he loathes the sight of the place as much as I do. I hope he suggests wiping it off the face of the earth; grubbing up the foundations and sowing salt. And I hope you’ll agree with him—and clear out of the way so as not to watch it being done! I’d like to come here in a couple of days’ time and see turf laid here, where we’re standing now!”

  Wharton shrugged his shoulders. “You’re talking riddles!”

  “I’m not! My God I’m not! Wharton, will you do that? If he suggests what I say, will you let him?”

  “Why not? But what’s the point?”

  Travers suddenly looked very hopeless—even miserable. “I can’t tell you. It’s not a point—it’s not even an intuition. When you’ve done something—something I can’t do—then I’ll tell you . . . and you’ll probably laugh like blazes. Find this out for me—find it out in the house. Why did Fewne tip that last drink into his pocket? Why did he run like a lunatic through the snow instead of round by the hedge? Why did he write that scrawl? And why did he dance with three people only—one of them a woman he must have loathed?”

  Wharton shook his head and said nothing. Franklin tried a short cut.

  “If Fewne was murdered, the balloons did it!”

  Travers smiled ironically. “That’s what I thought—at first. Suppose one of his balloons was filled with that lethal ingenuity that Braishe invented. The gas was heavier than air! That particular balloon would have flopped about—not floated!”

  “Yes, but the temperature of the room would have expanded the gas and made the balloon float.”

  “Oh, dear, no! The temperature of the balloon and the temperature of the room would have remained relative! And there’s something else: we know that at least two of those balloons Fewne carried were burst during the evening—and nothing happened. Not only that: Braishe couldn’t have known that Fewne was going to run amok and slash those balloons about!”

  “That’s right enough!” said Wharton decisively. “The balloons didn’t do it.” He clicked his tongue. “All the same, I can’t see why he took all that trouble to do himself in—unless Braishe had dinned i
nto him that the gas was so damnably deadly that when Fewne went mad he had it on his brain as an obsession.”

  “Then,” said Franklin, “why didn’t he take a sniff and get it over?”

  “Exactly! That’s where I’m beaten. Now, if Mr. Travers could say to me, ‘I had a good look round that grate and fireplace and there wasn’t a siphon there!’ then there’d be something to go on!” and he looked at Travers hopefully.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that. I looked in the fireplace but not round the inside. Why should I? And it was as dark as blazes.” He suddenly fumbled in his waistcoat pocket. “He didn’t burn anything that I could see, except—well, what do you make of these?” He produced the metal tabs. “Pair of tabs from bootlaces by the look of ’em.”

  “Not a pair!” corrected Wharton. “A single lace has two tabs. But why should he burn a bootlace?—unless—”

  “It wasn’t that!” interrupted Travers. “At least, I couldn’t find a new lace in any of his shoes.”

  He pocketed the tabs again. “Got any ideas about that scrawl?”

  “Not a one. Paradine was telling us his theory.”

  “Quite! It’s a good theory. However . . .” and he smiled insinuatingly. “Perhaps during dinner—assuming you get any—you’ll be so good as to read that synopsis I was telling you about. Then you can fill in the official form.”

  Wharton grunted. “The only official form I feel like filling in at the moment is my own! What about getting back? Any other key to this place? It’s too cold to keep a man on duty.”

  Norris met them in the hall with a piece of news. Mrs. Cairns, whom he’d got to look through the clothing of the two women before the bodies went into the ambulance, had made a discovery. Inside the blouse Ransome had been wearing were three one-pound treasury notes tied round with a wisp of a handkerchief. Wharton didn’t grasp the point—he couldn’t be expected to. He was still trying to digest the mass of heterogeneous information he’d received from Franklin and Travers. However, he nodded to Norris: “Put ’em with the other exhibits!” and left it at that.

  It was Travers who suddenly saw a gleam of daylight.

  CHAPTER XVI

  WHARTON DOES HIS TRICKS

  TRAVERS and Franklin both went in to dinner that night. Wharton, however, definitely but courteously refused Braishe’s invitation, in spite of the opportunity it might have given him for a first-hand survey, under reasonably normal conditions, of the men with whom he was soon to come in contact. The General—to give him his nickname—contented himself with a pot of tea and a plate of cold meat, then got Pollock to take him round the house; photographers and what Menzies always called “the circus” following on behind. “Quite a nice, pleasant-spoken gentleman!” the butler afterwards told Mrs. Cairns. By the time Wharton had got some idea of a first objective and had told Norris what he wanted him to get from his interviews with the servants, Travers and Franklin were available again.

  That meal, in the breakfast room with a solitary footman on duty, was a most lugubrious affair. For one thing, the room was a change that kept on reminding people why they were in it at all. Then George Paradine was absent, on post-mortem work, which was a gruesome enough reminder. Worst of all, the third murder had leaked out, and there the very incompleteness of the information seemed to cause an uneasiness that set everybody to strange, distracted moments of thought, set nerves on edge, and gave the meal an atmosphere of unreality and disquietude. Nobody seemed to be hungry. Wildernesse and Challis more than once snapped at each other. Braishe was quiet in a nervy, restless sort of way, and altogether it was a pretty deadly business.

  As Wharton sat waiting for Challis to come to the dining room he was thinking of the very invidious position that Travers had been forced to occupy during those two days. Yet in one matter he was doing him scant justice. When Travers, in his report, had insisted that what had struck him most was the comparative readiness of the men to be questioned about the murder of Mirabel Quest, and had deduced from it the fact that none of them was therefore guilty or else was sure of getting away with it, Wharton had an interpretation that was private and different; that Travers was such a good sort generally and so obviously not a detective that the whole lot of them—murderer included—suffered precious little disquiet on his account. In other words, Wharton, as he watched Challis enter the room, saw no reason why he should not reach safely where Travers had merely travelled hopefully.

  “We want your help, Mr. Challis, please. Take a seat, will you!” and all the rest of the preliminaries.

  Challis looked round like a partially deflated balloon, but he soon brightened up.

  “Let me see, Mr. Challis. You’re the manager-producer of the Hilarities?”

  “That’s right!” He checked the “old boy” in time. Travers nearly laughed.

  “You’re a sort of coöptimistic theatrical party, aren’t you? Like the Follies when they first took a London theatre?”

  “Yes, that’s it!”

  “I saw your last show. Remarkably good, if I might say so. What’s your new one going to be like?”

  “Oh, very good! Splendid, in fact!”

  “Miss Quest going to be a great loss to you?”

  That pulled Challis up with a jerk. “Oh, yes—I mean, of course! She’ll be very difficult to replace.”

  “Exactly. Now to hard facts. You needn’t answer my questions unless you like. There’s no record being taken—as you see.” He leaned forward till he caught Challis’s eyes, and held them. “We’re not here to discuss morals or pay the least attention to them—but may we take it that your personal and intimate relations with the deceased were . . . what they were rumoured to be?”

  “I don’t see what you’re getting at!”

  “You will!” said Wharton confidently. “Just yes or no, Mr. Challis!”

  “Well—er—I’m damned if I know what you mean—but I’ll say yes.”

  Wharton nodded. “She was rather trying at times?”

  “She had the hell of a temper, if that’s what you mean!”

  “Quite! You’d even thought seriously of a change?”

  Challis’s face coloured violently. “What do you mean by a change?”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Wharton. “Never mind who they are, but witnesses are prepared to swear that Miss Quest had a violent scene with you over—well, let’s call her A. M.—who was in your spring show. She more or less gave you your choice. She’d go if the other didn’t. Now, unknown to Miss Quest, you’ve engaged A. M. for your new show. The last time, A. M. went! This time you’re prepared to stand the racket!”

  “I was prepared to be master in my own show!”

  “Exactly. But, tell me. Suppose the alternative had been given you again—as it certainly would have been if Miss Quest had remained alive—what would you have done?”

  Challis looked down, snapped his eyes—and said nothing.

  “Let me put it another way,” went on Wharton. “Suppose you had been the strong man and had let Miss Quest leave the show, would she have been still agreeable to continuing in—er—any other capacity?”

  Challis shuffled again as he caught the drift of the argument. His face flushed. “If you think I ... got rid of her, you’re on a wrong tack. Ask Travers. He’ll tell you where I was. I couldn’t have done it!”

  Wharton smiled benevolently. “Mr. Travers has told me! It would have been a remarkably ingenious feat if you had done it!”

  “Then what are you hinting at it for?”

  “I’m not. I’m handing out caps, and you’re fitting them on! However, let’s get to something else. Ransome—what was your opinion of her?”

  “A hellcat—that’s what she was!”

  “Exactly!” He caught Challis’s eyes again. “Now a question which you’ve got to answer—either here or on oath in the coroner’s court. Why was Ransome alone in your bedroom with you this morning?”

  It took a long time and a good deal of patience to extract that story. Acco
rding to Challis—and Wharton believed him—he’d asked Ransome to keep her ears open if anything was mentioned about himself, in view of the particular relationship in which he stood with the dead woman. He’d met Ransome by appointment, and she’d told him the questions Travers had asked her. She’d gone on to say she could tell Travers quite a lot of things if she were so minded: quarrels with the dead woman and unsavoury titbits generally. Challis had anticipated that. He’d borrowed some money from Braishe, who’d some spare cash in the safe, and had coughed up three quid, to use his own words. Five minutes after, he’d seen the coast clear and gone off, leaving her to follow; the idea being that if she were seen in the room it’d cause no particular comment. On his way down to the hall he’d seen nobody.

  “Where’d you go then?” asked Wharton.

  “I saw Pollock and asked if he’d send in some beer. Then I went to the billiard room and knocked the balls about a bit. Then I went and found that swine Crashaw and got him to have a game.”

  “Know where the others were?”

  “I don’t . . . only Crashaw. He was in the dining room—when I found him.”

  “And what did Ransome do with the notes?”

  “She stuck ’em down her dress.”

  “Tie ’em up at all?”

  He hesitated for a moment. “Yes—she tied a handkerchief round ’em. Just like her—clutching hand and all that!”

  Wharton got to his feet. “Well, I think that’s all. You’ve helped us a good deal, Mr. Challis,” and so on, to all the rest of the apologetics and smoothings-over that Challis rose to with really pathetic faith. When he left the room he was almost himself again.

  “We’ve got him scared!” said Wharton. “What’s your opinion? Did he kill her to save blackmail?”

  “I don’t think he did,” said Travers, and smiled at a certain recollection. “I know Challis’d do a lot to save money, but I don’t think he did that. Also, if he killed her, you can bet your life he’d have had his three pounds back!”