Case with 4 Clowns (20 page)

“I know. But I've thought of another aspect of it,” replied Jackson. “Suppose there's no murder at all. The company are already growing a little nervous about the affair. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they really believe the story, but it makes them a bit jumpy when they see a detective about the tober. If that went on for very long there's no telling what might happen to the show.”

“Are you saying that Gypsy Margot is trying to break up the show?” asked Beef.

“It's a possibility, isn't it?” said Jackson, spreading his hands.

Beef grunted. “Any reason to think she might want to?” he asked.

“She's always been touchy about me since I bought the circus from her brother,” answered Jackson. “It wasn't much to look at in those days. But they'd built it up from nothing, and I suppose she was proud of it. Anyway, I know she was against selling it. In the end, I had to put a clause in the contract that she was to be allowed to travel around with it whenever she wanted to. On and off she's been with us ever since.”

“If you don't mind my asking,” interrupted Beef, “what did you do, Mr. Jackson, before you took up the show business?”

“I don't see that that has anything to do with the matter,” said Jackson shortly.

“Well, you know,” said Beef persuasively, “early life and that. ‘At his mother's knee.' You see, Mr. Townsend here's got to write a book about this case and it might come in useful to him.”

“Then Mr. Townsend had better look elsewhere for his material,” said the proprietor coldly. “I am not, and have no intention of being, a romantic character.”

“Oh, well,” said Beef, “if you won't, you won't. Still, there's a lot more questions I wanted to ask you.” The Sergeant flicked back the pages of his notebook and licked the lead of his pencil thoughtfully. “Ah, yes,” he went on, “when did you first get to know Pete Daroga?”

“When I engaged him directly after I'd bought up the circus,” said Jackson after a slight pause, in which I thought I noticed a slightly surprised expression cross his face.

“Personal friend?” asked Beef.

“Not particularly. Certainly no more than any of the other artists. I'm not the sort of man who makes personal friendships.”

And looking at the proprietor's hard expression, I could quite believe that last sentence.

“Why do you ask?” continued Jackson. “Have you got anything against him?”

“No, not yet,” said Beef. “Not yet.”

From the expression in Jackson's voice as he asked the question I felt somehow that he would have been more pleased if Beef had had something against the wire-walker. Since the Sergeant had first mentioned Daroga's name, I thought I had detected a difference in Jackson's voice. It was not quite a hardness; rather a greater precision with his words as though the whole subject were a little distasteful to him. But Beef's next action was even more surprising, for he suddenly pulled the little button which he had previously found on the floor of that very wagon, out of his pocket and pushed it almost under the proprietor's nose.

“Did you ever see this before?” he asked.

Jackson stared at the button with intense amazement, and his brown face slowly turned to a dirty gray color. For a moment he seemed incapable of speech altogether, and then he managed to gasp out: “Where did you get that?”

“Found it lying around,” said Beef casually.

“Who else has seen it?” Jackson was sitting forward on the extreme edge of his chair as he spoke.

“No one,” said Beef.

Suddenly Jackson snatched the button from where it lay in Beef's outstretched palm and put it quickly in his pocket. “As a matter of fact,” he said, with something of his former coldness, “it happens to be mine. It seems to me that it's no business of yours, in any case.”

The door opened suddenly and Corinne entered. She raised her eyebrows at seeing Beef and myself, but said nothing. Jackson sat back in his chair, and his face seemed suddenly to reassume its normal cynical expression.

“Are you going out again?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Corinne defiantly, as if expecting trouble about it. “After I've changed.”

Beef started to his feet with a jerk. “We must be going,
anyway,” he said, and nudged me towards the door as quickly as he could. “Thank you very much, Mr. Jackson. Good night.”

“Whatever was the hurry?” I demanded as soon as we were outside.

“I got caught like that once before,” said Beef, wiping his forehead. “That girl doesn't care who she takes her clothes off in front of.”

April 29th (continued).

“D
O YOU
remember which day they said the Jubilee performance was to be?” I asked Beef when we had returned to our wagon.

“Saturday, wasn't it,” said Beef. “Saturday, May the third?”

I made a quick calculation. “That's strange,” I commented. “Do you realize that May the third is the time limit?”

“Time limit? I don't know what you're talking about. Why can't you say something sensible instead of making it into a mystery?”

“Gypsy Margot,” I pointed out, “gave a certain time limit within which, she said, the murder would be committed. And the last day of that prediction happens to be the day of the Jubilee performance. What do you think of that?”

“Might be an accident,” said Beef, “or she might have thought it was a good date to pick on, or, on the other hand, she might have known something we don't. How should I know?”

“I don't know
how,”
I said coldly, “but I think you ought to.”

“Oh, I don't think there's much in that,” said Beef carelessly, and began to prepare himself for bed.

“And another thing,” I persisted. “That button. What was the point of that? Just when it looked like turning into something interesting you let Jackson snatch it away from you.”

“Well, it was his, wasn't it?” demanded Beef. “And, anyway, I took a copy of what was written on it. Doesn't seem to make sense to me, but see what you can make of it.”

He handed me his notebook opened at a page on which were printed the letters A.P.T.N.C..T.

“What do you suppose they stand for?” I asked. “They might mean almost anything.”

“Can't make out what they mean at all,” said Beef as I looked at them. “Perhaps it's a trade union or something. They're fond of having long strings of letters—like the A.U.B.T.W. or the N.U.W.M., and all the rest of them. Never could make out what they were all about.”

“Well,” I said, “the A probably stands for Association, the N for National, and the T for Trades.”

“Like the Association of Pipe-Turners and National Carving Trades,” suggested Beef.

“Good Lord, of course,” I said.

“Only,” said Beef, “there's probably no such union. I just made it up as I went along. And, anyway, Jackson's not a pipe-turner, is he?”

“Still,” I said, “we can find out about that later. The point now is to discover something about the relationship between Suzanne and Len Waterman. Jackson told us that she joined the circus before the Darienne brothers, and that she was here nearly ten years before they came. Time enough for her to give that photograph to Len Waterman—and mean what she wrote on it, too.”

“That's something we've got to find out about,” stated Beef. “Trouble is these circus people are like oysters. They never tell you anything about themselves unless it's by accident.”

“What about Gypsy Margot?” I asked. “She doesn't seem to be in love with the circus. Perhaps she might tell us something.”

“That's the one,” said Beef. “And we'll see her tomorrow morning. I'm going to turn in now.”

The show was just coming to an end in the big tent, and the lights and people made me feel that bed was the last place I wanted to go to just then.

“I think I'll take a turn outside first,” I said. “You get some sleep, if you like. I'll try not to wake you as I come back.”

Beef had already drawn his shirt over his shoulders, and as I left the wagon his voice came indistinctly through the linen shrouding his head.

“Gmyloveta,” he seemed to say.

“What did you say?” I queried, with my foot already on the top step.

Beef's face, red with exertion and wreathed with a wide grin, emerged from the shirt. “I said: ‘Give my love to Anita',” he said.

As I wandered around the ground I thought how little of the country one really saw from a traveling circus. Perhaps it was our own fault. The circus people themselves seemed to know every corner of England, however remote, and could remember places even ten and twelve years after. But I had traveled with the circus through some half a dozen villages, and I found it impossible to even name them in the order in which we had passed through them. Today, I knew, we were at Beverley. But that was only because the Minster stood right next to the tober as a constant reminder. The moon lit its intricately carved exterior, and the tower with its overhanging gargoyles seemed to lean right across the big top. It was a fine night for a walk, with everything brightly lit and quiet. As if echoing my thoughts, a voice said at my ear:

“A lovely night for a walk,” and I turned to find Anita smiling not more than a yard away from me.

“Beef's gone to bed,” I said. “He's not affected by the moon.”

Anita gave a cry of dismay. “Our watchdog gone to sleep?” she said. “Why, we might all be murdered in our beds.”

“Honestly, though,” I said quickly, taking advantage of the subject. “I feel very nervous about you.”

“Me? Why me?”

I went on to tell her of the discussion which Beef and I had
had about the possible murder, and the discovery that she had been present in both attempts so far. Anita seemed, however, unaffected by this.

“I think that is just chance,” she said. “Why should anyone want to kill me?”

“That's what we're trying to find out,” I said grimly. “But the fact remains that you're in possible danger. Personally I think you're perfectly safe as long as you don't appear in the ring. But as soon as you begin performing, I think—provided it is you who are in danger—that another attempt will be made.”

Anita laughed. “Then you'll have to come and watch very carefully,” she said. “So that if I am killed you will know who did it.”

“Actually,” I said, with difficulty, “I'm much more concerned about keeping you out of this than I am with the Sergeant's new case. I mean …” but the words would not come in consecutive order and I broke off.

Anita's eyes had a peculiar twinkle in them as she looked up at me. “I think,” she said gently, “that we'd better start walking back now. It's time I was in bed, anyway.”

I felt extremely foolish as we walked back to the tober, but Anita kept up a string of light remarks which served to cover my embarrassment. In my ears I seemed to hear Beef's caustic comments on my “romantic nature” and squirmed inwardly at the thought of them.

“Good night,” said Anita quietly as we reached her wagon. She spoke almost as if she were saying good-by to an invalid in a hospital, and pressing my hand quickly she ran up the steps and disappeared into the wagon.

I felt that I could not bear to return to the wagon under the sceptical eyes of the Sergeant, so I walked over to the clowns' wagon, which was, I knew, often used as a sort of meeting-place for the artists after the show. It was almost full of human beings, and with the minimum of fuss I was greeted,
given a mug of beer, and settled in a corner. Next to me was Pete Daroga, who merely grunted a greeting at me and then seemed to retire into his thoughts.

The conversation which was being tossed backwards and forwards across my head was mostly concerned with the show, and I soon lost interest and began to study Pete, who had taken a letter from his pocket and was studying it with concentration.

Noticing my interest, he held the letter out to me with a grin. “It's an invitation to join a European circus,” he said, with obvious enthusiasm. “It's a big show that is touring the Soviet Union just now. I wrote to the manager at Leningrad, and he's replied that they would be glad to have me next season.”

The letter was typed in a language that I could not understand. In fact, the alphabet itself was beyond me, although many of the letters were similar to our own.

“That's Russian,” said Daroga. “Listen, I'll translate it for you.”

He held the sheet between us and read out in English while his finger followed the Russian words.

“Comrade artist Daroga,” he translated, “the management committee have great pleasure …”

But I did not hear the rest of the letter. The second word on the typescript sheet—the word which Pete had translated as “artist,” was written APTNCT, except that the center stroke of the N was written in the reverse direction to the usual English letter.

As soon as I could I congratulated Peter Daroga and got away from the wagon. This was obviously the solution of the problem of the mysterious lettering on the button. I ran quickly to the wagon and shook Beef into consciousness.

The Sergeant was not, at first, very enthusiastic.

“You remember that button?” I said. “Well, I think I've
found something out about it. Quick, where did you put your notebook? I want to see the letters you copied down.”

“What are you shouting about?” demanded Beef. “You gone crackers, or something?”

After a time I managed to impress upon him that I had important news, and he staggered out of bed and threw his overcoat round his shoulders.

“Well,” he said doubtingly, “here it is. What's the idea you've got?”

“Look,” I said, pointing, “the N on this is backwards.”

“Very interesting, I'm sure,” said Beef sarcastically. “I'm very pleased you woke me up to tell me. Now I suppose I can go back to bed.”