Case with 4 Clowns (23 page)

I did not answer because I was thinking. I had never been involved in a case with so many tangled threads of emotion as this one. Somehow or other I had come to think of murder mysteries as being fairly straightforward affairs, in which one looked for typical and rather common motives, such as revenge, greed, jealousy, madness; something quite simple once you had put all the clues in the right order. But with this case there were no clues to speak of, and the emotions were mixed and muddled to such an extent that it would be hard to say whether any of them constituted a motive for murder. It was altogether too lifelike. Murder stories were better when they remained simple, and did not get mixed up with real people and real feelings. Murder was no doubt a profound crime, but a story about murder, I felt, should be anything but that. Quite beyond my own wishes I was being drawn into a case in which there was scarcely a clue. It would hardly make, I thought, a detective story at all.

“You know,” said Beef, breaking in on my reflections, “this may be a very unusual case, but I can't help saying that I'm enjoying it. Change from the old routine.”

“I wish,” I said, all my bitterness welling up, “that you'd get on with a little more of the
routine
investigation. That would be a change all right. What am I going to make of this case if you don't get on with something active? Here we are, after days of wasted time in the circus, and simply nothing to show for it. You know, the trouble with you, Beef, is that you're too lazy. If you'd been almost any other detective you'd have been clubbed insensible four or five times, pushed over a precipice, shot, kidnaped, run over, caught in a burning building, blown up by a bomb, and a hundred other unpleasant but exciting things. If you had a little more respect for tradition you'd see what I mean. Every other detective of any standing at all is threatened half a dozen times a day. Have you ever been threatened?”

“Yes,” said Beef triumphantly after a moment's thought. “How about that time I got an anomalous letter?”

“I never heard about that,” I said skeptically.

“That's right,” said Beef. “Someone wrote to me and threatened to tell the inspector about how I used to go round the back of the ‘Blue Dragon' and get a drink after hours, when I was on duty.”

“And did they?” I asked.

“I don't know,” said Beef. “But the funny thing was that a day or two after that the inspector dropped round and had a drink with me. So I suppose they must have done.”

“I can't help feeling,” I persisted, “that you ought to be attacked or something. It's hardly respectable to have an investigator who lives in the lap of safety the way you do.”

“Here, you lay off that stuff,” said Beef becoming a little alarmed. “Didn't I risk being knocked over the head when we had that scrap with the other circus people? What more do you want for your money? Anyway, I'm not supposed to be a hero. I solve my cases by brain-work, that's what I do. There's no call to drag in a lot of violence.”

“Brain-work!” I said. I felt that Beef was rather overreaching himself, but I could think of nothing to say in reply.

“And what's more,” went on Beef, thoroughly aroused now, “you seem to forget that tiger escaping. Why I might have been eaten alive, or something. That's never happened before in my other cases, and I don't want it to happen again. No, those were the sort of cases I like. Nice quiet ones, with no danger or discomfort. And if you did your work proper and found jobs for me I shouldn't have had to come all the way up to Yorkshire.”

This was, without doubt, the last word. And we walked the rest of the way to our wagon in silence.

April 30th (continued).

C
ALLING
for Anita some time during the afternoon to take her for a stroll had now become something of an established custom of mine, and although her wound had completely healed she still took my arm as we walked. To be perfectly honest, I think she would have got more exercise had she gone by herself, but I somewhat weakly refrained from suggesting this to her.

For me these walks had become small tours of exploration of the district we passed through, and although this was not a very impressive part of Yorkshire, there was a sort of lazy comfort to be obtained from the wide sun-warmed fields and lanes. On this particular day we went a little farther than usual. The surrounding fields were a patch-work of different shades of green, and the tiny footpaths through them stretched their straight lines in a network far away from the tober.

As we walked in single file along one of these footpaths the drills of pale-green wheat-blades seemed to curve towards us, straighten themselves, and then curve away again behind.

“It has a sort of hypnotic effect,” I said to Anita, after a few minutes. “The sun flickering through a spile fence does much the same thing.”

“That reminds me,” I added, when she did not answer, “that you told us your mother was a hypnotist.”

“Yes, that's right. You had a theory that she had something to do with Helen stabbing me, didn't you? Do you still believe that?”

“Well,” I said awkwardly. “I only thought of it as a possibility, you know. In this sort of business, detection I mean, you have to take every single factor into consideration.”

“I see,” said Anita, “so you haven't really made up your mind. Is that it?”

“That's it,” I said gratefully. “We can only know things like that for certain when the case is over. If it ever is over,” I added with a sigh.

“You know,” went on Anita thoughtfully, “you have quite the wrong idea about hypnotism. Most writers have I think. It's quite a simple thing really—you can hypnotize yourself, if you care to. But I don't think it would get you anywhere. You see, the sort of hypnotism that my mother dabbles in is quite harmless. She can't make people
do
anything. She just sends them into a trance, that's all. You can get rid of a headache that way sometimes.”

“Do you mean to say,” I exclaimed, “that it is impossible to make people perform certain actions of which they know nothing when they wake up again?”

“Oh, I don't know about that,” said Anita. “But what I meant was that I had never seen my mother do anything like that.”

I left the subject there, and when in a little while we turned back towards the tober, the conversation passed easily on to other matters of little interest to anybody else but Anita and myself.

We emerged, unexpectedly, on a lane which ran behind the tober, sunk lowdown like the bed of a spring stream and hidden from the tober itself by a high brambly hedge. No one seemed to be moving in the field. It was nearly time for the afternoon show, but the only person visible from where we stood was the groom, who was leisurely applying whiting to the mane of one of the ring horses and sissing gently and soothingly. It was the sort of afternoon which, had it been a Sunday in a London suburb, called for the harsh repetitive whirr of a lawn-mower or perhaps the very distant cry of a hawker. The leveling heat seemed to demand only sounds
which were familiar; continuous, recurring sounds. Anything else would have been like a knife slashing suddenly through the center of the heavy blanket of the sky.

And suddenly, inevitably, the disturbing sound came. It was the high-pitched scream of an angry elephant, and then, rushing quickly into the silence behind it, the violent sound of a man swearing. It was the voice of a frightened man, made brave by the loudness of his own voice.

Without comment of any sort Anita and I scrambled quickly up the bank out of the lane and crawled through the hedge into the tober. One or two people had already appeared on the field and were moving towards the elephant tent, but before any of us could reach it the elephant trumpeted again, and this time the body of a man was hurled through the tent flap and landed limply and heavily on the grass. Anita ran over to him and knelt on the ground.

“It's the new elephant man,” she said, as her fingers quickly set about undoing his shirt-collar.

The man's face was a gray mud color, and from the corner of his nostril ran a thin dark trickle of blood. He seemed soft and yielding, like a piece of clay; scarcely a man at all. Then, slowly, he opened his eyes and moved his head. He stared at us for a moment with an incredulous, hurt expression, and then slowly, one by one, he began to move his arms and legs, watching them doubtfully.

“Seems all right,” he said at last.

“Try and stand,” said Anita, and together we helped him on to his feet. He swayed for a moment, and then, shaking his head with a queer worried movement, he grinned shakily at us, as if to show he was all right.

By this time most of the others had gathered round and were waiting for some sort of an explanation.

“What happened?” said Beef, pushing his way through the group, as only a trained policeman can.

Hesitantly, the man told us. It was quite brief. Apparently, he had been cleaning one of the elephants for the afternoon show, when it had screamed at him. He stepped up close to it to show that he was not to be intimidated, but the animal began to wind its trunk round his body. For a moment he had struggled, striking the elephant with the back of the heavy brush he had in his hand, but the squeeze of the trunk had tightened until he was no longer able to breathe and he lost consciousness before the animal threw him out of the tent.

I was surprised to find everybody taking the affair quite coldly. It was nothing very new to have a man attacked by an elephant it seemed. Daroga, directly he had heard the man's story, walked straight into the elephant tent and we could hear his voice talking to the elephant in a low, soothing tone.

“They do that sometimes,” said Daroga to Beef. “One of the elephants takes it into his head that he doesn't like one of the men. After that it's best for the chap to go home if he wants to do it all in one piece.”

The new hand looked at Daroga and gave a grin. “I never ran away from an elephant yet,” he said, “and I don't mean to start now. I'll have him eating out of my hand in a couple of days, you see if I don't.”

“As long as he doesn't eat your hand,” said Daroga. “Still, that's your business.”

That seemed to be the opinion of the others, and slowly they drifted away from the tent and went back to their wagons. One or two, however, remained, and Beef and I noticed that they seemed discontented. It was Sid Bolton, the fat clown, who voiced the reason for this.

“It's not only his safety that's concerned in this,” he said. “Those elephants are not safe for anybody if there's someone about they've taken a dislike to.”

“How do you mean?” I asked. “Does it disturb them, or something?”

“Well, look at us in the ring. Clem and I have to roll about under the elephants' feet as part of the clowning—that's all right when the animals are in their right minds, but I don't go much on it if they're nervous.”

“You see,” joined in Clem Gail, “it makes them restless. Maybe they wouldn't hurt anybody else on purpose, but when they get like that they might do damage to anybody who was near them. It's too dangerous to play about with animals that way. If they don't like someone, then you ought to get rid of him straight away. What an elephant says, goes.”

They were not the only ones who were feeling uncomfortable about the affair. I noticed one or two of the others discussing the affair in various parts of the field, mostly those artists who appeared in the ring with the elephants at one time or another.

“There's only one thing to do,” said Anita. “And that is to go and see Jackson about it. He's the boss.”

“He's also ring-master,” said Clem, “so he won't like the risk any more than we do.”

With the usual amount of talk and argument, the artists at last decided to go straight to the proprietor and tell him what they thought. Beef and I watched the little procession lining up before the wagon, while Sid Bolton knocked on the door.

“You know,” said Beef thoughtfully, “this is a funny do.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Do you think the new man is purposely annoying the elephants for some reason? I should think it was a rather dangerous thing to do.”

“I didn't say as I thought anything of the kind,” said Beef. “All I said was as it was a funny do. You always exaggerate everything.”

We saw Jackson open the door at Sid Bolton's knock and went across to hear what he had to say about it. There was
actually little necessity for this, as his voice was loud enough to be heard almost all over the tober.

“Well, you know my feelings about the affair,” he said to the crowd gathered at his wagon steps. “I didn't like it in the first place. But it's Daroga you want to see about it, not me.”

“But you can sack the man, can't you?” said Sid Bolton. “He's a danger to the show, that's what he is. Better for all of us if he went. He doesn't know Fanny Anny about elephants, and he'll only go and kill himself, and maybe us too, if someone doesn't tell him to clear off.”

But Jackson merely shrugged his shoulders at this. “Daroga put the man on,” he said coldly, “so if anyone's got to sack him you'd better go and persuade Daroga to do it.” And with that he shut his door on the disgruntled and murmuring group.

It seemed perfectly clear to me who had the whip-hand between these two men, Daroga and the proprietor. Jackson, I felt, would have been only too pleased to sack the new elephant man. But something stopped him from trying. What was it?

I turned to Beef. “You know,” I said, “I think Daroga's probably got something on Jackson, and is blackmailing him.”

“Go on,” said Beef derisively with a broad grin. “You don't say!”

April 30th (continued).

A
FTER
a few days with the circus, the show in the ring had begun to take on a new significance. Some of the turns seemed more and more brilliant, and some of them seemed just boring. One turn especially I enjoyed was the wire-walking act, and I went into the tent during the evening performance in time to see that only, and then came out again. I left Beef watching the show, and wandered slowly round the tent.