Case with 4 Clowns (2 page)

“Case Without a Murder,” said Beef triumphantly. “What more do you want?”

“But it wouldn't sell,” I reasoned.

“You're too conservative,” Beef taunted me. “Course it
would sell. You don't think people read those stories just for the murder, do you? Just being morbid? No, it's the solving they're after. Like a good puzzle to take their minds off other things, they do. But not just a professor's puzzle. Something with life in it, and excitement. That's what people like detective stories for. And something new, too. Now I'll give you an example. Look at that new bar of chocolate they brought out a while ago. ‘Jupiter,' or something to do with a star. Why, it sold like anything.”

“And suppose there's nothing in the whole affair?”

“We got to risk that.”

Mrs. Beef came into the room bearing the promised cups of tea. “There's the insurance man at the door,” she said. “Will you go and deal with him, William?”

“What do you think about this idea?” I asked Mrs. Beef as soon as the Sergeant had left the room. “Do you think we ought to go wandering in Yorkshire on such scanty evidence?”

“He would enjoy himself so,” replied Mrs. Beef. “The fresh air would be good for him just now, and him so tired and miserable like he is. It'd be like a holiday for him. Do let him go, Mr. Townsend.”

“But think of the waste of time,” I objected, “and money.”

“Oh, well. You never know,” said Mrs. Beef cheerfully. “You could always write a book about the circus even if nothing else turned up, couldn't you? Lady Eleanor Smith made a good thing of it. Why shouldn't you?”

The slamming of the front door warned us that Beef's interview with the insurance man was at an end, and in a few seconds he entered the room again.

“Well?” he said.

I sighed. “Where is this circus?” I asked, with resignation.

B
EEF
opened one weary eye, looked out at the flat, moving country, yawned and settled his head back with a grunt. We had been driving all day along the Great North Road in order to reach the Yorkshire coast before night. The Sergeant had slept most of the way since we stopped for lunch, gurgling gently and regularly at my side, his bulky figure completely filling the seat and rolling against my arm whenever we turned a sharp corner.

The road ran almost imperceptibly into the outskirts of Doncaster, and Beef sat up and rubbed his eyes.

“Where are we?” he asked as he pulled out his watch, and then continued without waiting for my reply: “Anyway, it's time we had a little stop somewhere. You must be tired of driving all this way.”

“This concern touches me,” I said shortly.

Beef put his watch away. “It's ten past six,” he said decisively, and began to look anxiously out of the side of the car for somewhere to park.

Not until he set his emptied glass back on the counter did he speak again.

“Same again, miss,” he said, then suddenly, making violent signs to me, he pointed over the girl's head. “D'you see that there?” he asked excitedly.

I followed the direction of his wide forefinger to a bright yellow fly-bill which hung against the glass at the back of the bar. “Jacobi's Circus,” read the heading, and then beneath divided off into separate squares were the lurid names of the performers, their acts and their records.

“That's the one,” said Beef triumphantly. “That's the circus our Albert works for. Coming here in a week's time, it
says.” His voice sank to a whisper. “And for all we know it might be in this very town that a murder is committed.”

“If it hasn't already
been
committed,” I suggested frigidly.

I found it impossible to take this case seriously. What Beef said was no doubt true; it was this case or nothing as far as he was concerned. But, nevertheless, I could not see what we should get out of coming to Yorkshire. It boiled down to a gypsy's warning and nothing more, and to me it seemed rather fatuous that two grown men should travel over two hundred miles on such flimsy material. But Beef seemed to have made up his mind that everything would be all right, and it was not my place to attempt to discourage him. The investigator's biographer, I had learned, had no active function other than lending his car, his time, and his pen. His advice was supposed in advance to be both misleading and useless, so that when I said to Beef, “I think the whole idea is crazy,” I was only doing what was expected of me, and that the case should, by all the rules, proceed to a successful conclusion in spite of me. My last remark then had been quite in keeping with my role, and I led the way out of the public-house with something of a feeling of satisfaction.

It was already growing dark by the time we reached the little seaside village of Hornsea, where the circus was playing that night, and we had very little trouble in finding the field, as every small boy we met knew, not only where it was but also how many elephants the circus had and what the clown said when one of them trod on his toe.

The evening performance had started and the sound of the band playing a brassy tango greeted us as we drove on to the field. A tall, upright young fellow in evening dress stood at the tent-flap and walked slowly over to us as we stood on the wide patch of grass before the tent looking around.

“Could you tell us where we could find Albert Stiles?” I asked.

The young man looked blank.

Beef nudged me. “Foreigner,” he said. “Let me handle this.” And then with wide gestures of his hands and arms he bellowed at the man: “Albert Stiles. He work for circus. See? We want see Albert Stiles. Tent hand.”

The youth's face cleared. “Oah, you mean Albert,” he said, with a grin. “ 'E's dahn the elerphant tent.” And pointing airily to the other side of the ground, he strolled back to his position by the entrance of the tent.

The elephant tent, to which he had directed us, was a large green marquee, high and square and smelling very strongly of hay and elephant manure. There was a sharp rattle of chains as we approached, and lifting the flap we saw the hindlegs of one of the animals chained to a stake at the back of the tent. The legs were crossed in an amiable, almost human way, and from the interior came the sound of heavy blowing and munching. A dim storm lantern propped up on a bale of hay was the only light, and around it sat four men playing cards. For a moment I felt that I had walked into a Goya engraving. Deep shadows were over all the tent except in the little circle of light around the card-players who cast long exaggerated images up the walls of the tent like smoky flames rising sluggishly from a cauldron. The man with his back to us was sprawled backward, using the leg of one of the elephants as a shoulder-rest, while the trunk of the animal hung over between him and the others gently tearing hay from the improvised table. When this movement threatened to upset the cards one of the men prodded fiercely at the wandering trunk.

Beef cleared his throat noisily.

“—off,” said the man with his back to us.

The man facing us on the far side of the lantern scratching himself, began to re-deal the cards. There was silence for a while, broken only by the chewing of the elephants.

“Can you tell us,” broke in Beef at last, “where we could find Albert Stiles?”

The card-dealer stopped short at the question and looked up at us for the first time with a card suspended in his hand. In the yellow light his face was square and ugly, the long shadows running upward from his mouth to the corners of his eyebrows with a questioning slant. He appeared to be something of a hunchback, small and round, but with long, curved arms which stretched out like a pair of jointed fire-tongs. He watched us for a moment without speaking, a dead cigarette stub hanging from the corner of his lips, and then with a slight jerk of his head he indicated the far corner of the tent.

“ 'E's 'aving a kip be ind the 'ay,” he said briefly, and then returned to his dealing. The sandy-haired, broad-shouldered man on his right hand who sat cross-legged and shirtless on an upturned can picked up a piece of dirty sacking and tossed it towards the corner.

“Visitors to see you, Albert,” he shouted, and the four men went back to their game.

A long bony face, topped by an untidy thatch of yellow hair with which was mixed small pieces of hay, rose over the edge of the bales and stared at us. Albert Stiles looked at us sleepily with his mouth hanging slightly open.

“ 'Oo is it?” he said.

“Uncle William,” said Beef, moving forward into the light. “We got your letter.”

“Letter?” queried Albert drowsily.

“Yes,” I interrupted. “The one where you said you thought there was going to be a mur …”

Albert jumped to his feet and almost threw himself across the hay to us. “Let's talk outside,” he said breathlessly, and grabbing us both roughly he pushed us through the tent-flap into the open air.

“Why didn't you tell me you was coming?” he demanded
immediately. “Have you spoken to anyone else but me here?”

“Here, here,” said Beef, holding up one hand, “wait a minute. Let's get this straight. Did you or did you not write a letter to us saying there was going to be a murder here?”

Albert looked round him guiltily. “Not so loud,” he pleaded. “Do you want everyone to hear?”

“Look here, my lad,” warned Beef in a voice which recalled his old village constable days and which might have been directed at a boy with a too accurate catapult. “I don't want any playing about from you,” he continued. “Just tell us straight out what all this is about.”

Albert hesitated for a moment, and then led us over to the edge of the field away from the tents. “I wish I hadn't started this now,” he began.

“Come on,” said Beef, settling himself down on a fallen tree-trunk, “you know what I told you.”

“Well, it was like this. What I wrote in that letter was true all right, but I didn't like to tell anybody else about it.”

“Why?”

“They would have laughed at me. You see, they think old Margot—that's the gypsy—is a bit cracked. They would have said she was pulling my leg, and Ginger, the man you saw in there without a shirt on, he's always got a down on me and he wouldn't have given me no peace about a thing like that. You don't know what these blokes are like when they get started on you. Regular hell it is.”

“Well, that's all right,” said Beef. “I can do my investigating without anybody having any suspicions. I'll just hang around and keep my eyes open.”

The picture of Beef keeping his eyes open at a circus without anybody being suspicious of him struck me as particularly ludicrous, but my thoughts were interrupted by Albert.

“But if they don't know why you're 'ere,” he said, “ 'ow are
you going to
be
'ere? I mean, you can't just hang around and pretend to be looking at the little birds.”

“We'll have to tell the proprietor,” said Beef, after a moment's thought.

“Gor, not
'im,”
said Albert. “You don't know 'im. ‘E wouldn't go for nothing like that. 'E's a Tartar, 'e is. No funny business with 'im.”

But Beef was already on his feet, and despite the anxious protests of his nephew, began to walk towards the tent. At last it was a resigned Albert who led us towards the large blue wagon which stood at the entrance of the field.

“This is where part of it comes true, anyway,” he said. “The gypsy told me I'd lose my job.”

Beef knocked briefly on the curtained door, which was opened after a slight pause by a man in evening dress.

“I want to speak to Mr. Jacobi,” said Beef.

“Come in.”

“Are you Mr. Jacobi?” asked Beef.

The man bowed slightly and his lean brown face creased into a faint smile. “There is no such person,” he said gently. “I am the owner of Jacobi's Circus, but my name is actually Jackson. Ernest Jackson. Won't you sit down?” Then turning to Albert, who had remained at the foot of the steps, he said: “Thank you, Stiles,” and began to shut the door.

“Here, wait a minute,” interrupted Beef. “Let Albert in. He's got something to do with what we wanted to see you about.”

Jackson seemed to hesitate for a second, and then with a short “Come in, Stiles,” he held the door open while the boy sidled past him and stood awkwardly beside Beef.

“And now, Mr. Jackson,” said Beef in a business-like voice, “we've come to see you about a very peculiar thing. I don't say I believe in it myself, but there won't be no harm done if it's gone into. I understand from my nephew here that you've
got an old gypsy on the ground what tells people's fortunes.”

“Gypsy Margot?”

“That's her. Well, she told Albert something which I think you should know about and which I'd like to see into if you'll give me your permission.” Beef turned to Stiles. “Go on, tell Mr. Jackson what she told you.”

I watched Jackson's face while Albert told about the gypsy. He was a well set up man, probably about forty-five or fifty, although he carried himself like an athlete. His dark hair was almost black and plastered flat on his small, bony head. The rather wide, leathery mouth, brown skin and small ears gave him an appearance of concentrated efficiency which was emphasized by his clipped economy of speech. My first impression was one of surprise. I had expected, I suppose, an uncouth, uneducated tough; someone who dominated the circus by brute strength and muscle. This cool, precise man was a shock to me. He listened to the story with what seemed a complete absence of interest, and I could see he was unimpressed by it. His cynical eyes seemed to consider the problem as if it were an object lying on the table. He turned to Beef.

“Do you believe this story, Mr….”

“Beef,” said the Sergeant, hurriedly extracting a card from his wallet and handing it to the proprietor. “Well, I won't say as I do, but then on the other hand, I can't say I don't.”