The Beckoning Lady (12 page)

“But isn't he merely acting for Genappe?” Amanda demanded. “Won't it be Genappe's money?”

“That's almost right.” Minnie put the empty bottle under the bar counter. “That's why poor Fanny looked so guilty. He felt he was being wicked. Fanny has his own loyalty. He doesn't sin against money as a rule.”

“It's no good,” said Amanda, “I don't see it, and I don't like it.”

“You're just cross.” Minnie shook her head at her. “You think Fanny's going to spoil the village and that alarms you. Whereas the truth is that old Fanny has simply got so much money that it has become a commodity, and that means it must be used or it becomes so much dangerous waste. His experts have discovered that his toy is too expensive and must be made to earn, so they've got in this man Smith to see to it, in much the same way as the latex rubber man called in Tonker to invent the masks. What I just cannot conceive is what the S.S.S. man has thought of. I can't think what he could do with Potter's. Make it something awful, like a leper colony, perhaps. The village says a dog track, but that's wishful thinking. What
has
he thought of, Albert? Do you know?”

Mr. Campion met her eyes and looked away. “I'm not sure,” he said, “not sure at all. Are you thinking of selling?”

“My dear boy,” Minnie's laugh was infectious, “I'm concentrating very hard indeed on not selling. Where should I go? What a silly life it is, isn't it? The trouble I have just to live quietly and paint a few pictures!”

Having tidied the bar, she took her sheaf of notes from her pocket and began to scribble on one of them. Campion looked over her shoulder. “One bot. champers—No!” she had written, and he touched her arm.

“I ordered a portrait today,” he said. “I'll stand the brute that one.”

“Of course! I can query that.” She scored out the exclamation point and added a question mark. “Albert, how clever of you.”

“Not at all,” he said laughing. “I merely insist on my rights in the new order. And while we're on the subject, forgive me if I'm interfering but I do hope you've got a really good professional accountant? There are good and bad practitioners and a really good one can make the difference between reasonable peace and sheer unadulterated hell in this unenlightened age. Let me put you on to my chap. Aubrey is . . . . .”

“Oh no dear.” She waved the whole matter away as too difficult. “I haven't got the temperament. I just do what they tell me and then I know I'm doing right. I don't mind about that side of it.”

He stood looking at her, his head tilted and his pale eyes inquisitive. “Is there another side?” he asked at last.

Minnie grinned. “There was,” she said. “And very alarming too. But that's all right now. We've seen to that. Now where was I? Oh yes, the Palindromic V.I.P. I do wish he hadn't come here. He's started me worrying about those wretched lights.”

“For this place?” enquired Amanda with interest.

“Yes. We really ought to have something. The subject crops up whenever Tonker has a party. We can have lanterns inside but the outside presents a problem. It'll be worse this time because the river will be up. We're going to use the wherry raft as a bridge, but it won't be terribly safe, especially with the Augusts about.”

“It sounds terrifying,” said Campion sincerely. “How deep will the river be?”

Minnie considered. “Not quite two foot just here,” she said. “Not serious, but—well—”

“Wet,” suggested Mr. Campion.

“As anything,” she agreed. “Once when we did it before, we drove a car on to the lawn and turned the headlights on, and let the battery down and the people had to stay all night.”

Amanda turned to the doorway. “I'll fix you some lights,” she said. “I saw Scatty's son working on the wherry. He and I could get you quite a blaze.”

“Could you?” Minnie had the layman's attitude towards electricity which confuses it with magic.

“Of course we could.” The prospect of a glorious potter about was too much for Amanda. “I'll just go and sound him and see what he's got in the way of flex. Would you care for your name in lights, or The Lady Beckoning? Keep an eye on Rupert, Albert. He'll have to go to bed soon. I'll hurry, Minnie. We shall have to rout round the village, I expect.”

She went off and the older woman looked after her. “That hair with that boiler-suit!” she said. “Isn't she wonderful! And these '
S-P-I-V
's, Albert, aren't
they
extraordinary? However furious one is with them one always finds oneself going to enormous lengths to get them what they want.”

Mr. Campion laughed and his glance fell on the tumbler which was still on the bar.

“What about this?”

She took it up and sniffed it again. “That's more peculiar than you think,” she said. “It really is. Jake doesn't drink spirits and neither does Emma. The children would hardly have a bottle of whisky, and I haven't any. The siphon belongs to the orange squash, and so does the glass I suppose. It does look as though someone came in, opened a bottle he'd brought, and poured a drink.”

“Could anybody walk into the place and out again without being seen?”

“Oh yes.” She spoke without any doubt whatever. “It's
the country, you know. I often find people wandering about looking for me. If the policeman comes to see if I've paid my dog licence, the chances are I find him on the stairs . . . which reminds me, Albert, that poor tramp. I saw you with the detective. What's he like? I had a very soft spot for the old Superintendent but this man is new. What do you think of him?”

Mr. Campion considered Fred South. “Rather an impressive item,” he said at last.

“Thank God for that.” Minnie showed her weariness. “Come on,” she said, “children first, and then, at last, pictures. He can be relied upon to see to all that, then, can he?”

“Who?”

“This man South.”

“Oh yes,” said Mr. Campion slowly, a considerable shadow passing over his affable face. “Oh yes, he'll see to everything. He's that sort of chap.”

IT WAS MOONLIGHT
when Mr. Campion sat in the yard with his arm round Amanda and wondered if the scene was quite true. It was one of those nights which only a capricious climate can achieve, and then only occasionally. The soft sweet-scented wind stirred the fresh leaves without noise, and the silver highlights on barn and tree were liquid and still warm with the day's gold. Behind them the kitchen, lit by oil-lamps, looked like a Dutch painting. Minnie sat at the table having a final conference with her henchmen, Westy and the friend he had brought from school, who were laying in stores apparently for a night's camping.

Supper was over, the dishes were dried, the younger children sorted out and restored some to their parents who had called for them, and some to the cottage. Mr. Campion had indulged in a mild flirtation with the twins, whose names were so far as he knew Yellow Drawers and Blue Drawers, and had been gratified to discover that they were Emma Bernadine's contingent. Annabelle the beautiful was in her bed and Rupert, with Choc on the floor beside him, had been put to sleep on Minnie's. Amanda was waiting for her new ally, Scat, son of her old henchman Scatty Williams. He had slipped down the village on silent sneaker-shod feet to post a letter for Mr. Campion, to pick up a plug, and to fetch the station wagon from the Mill.

“You say you rang and rang the Mill and there was no reply?” murmured Mr. Campion at last. “Luke's still out then, the old . . . otter hunter.”

Amanda closed the clasp knife she was holding and thrust it into a pocket.

“That was hours ago,” she objected reasonably. “It was still sunny when we put Rupert on the bed in Minnie's room. I've not telephoned since for fear of waking him. He must have passed out quite peacefully. There hasn't been a sound from him. Anyway, I've told Scat that if he sees a light in the Mill house he's to knock. I think Charlie Luke will feed himself. Don't be so jealous.”

Mr. Campion stiffened. “I'll chuck you in the river for that. What a monstrous thing to say.”

“All right,” said Amanda with dignity, “but it's a perfectly sensible reaction. It's always jolly frightening when one's friends fall in that sort of love.”

“Why?”

“Well, they're never the same again, are they? A fusion of metals and all that. I mean, love isn't a cement, it's a solvent. Look at Minnie and Tonker.”

Her own peculiar quality of inspired common sense comforted him and surprised him, as it always did.

“The only thing is,” she went on, “that like any other Act of God it can't be helped.”

Mr. Campion looked at the barn in the moonlight. “It's such a pity. He's such a good chap, so sound. If it had been any other girl in the world, almost, it might have been the making of him. But this can only mean an upset at a time when he's due to make a great effort, and a chip on his shoulder for the rest of his life.”

Amanda remained silent for a moment or so and all the little stirrings in the garden became audible in the night.

“Prune is a strange girl,” she said at last. “It's only that incipient inferiority complex—the other-people-think-so-even-if-I-do line—which I find depressing.”

“Prune,” Mr. Campion was uncharacteristically savage, “is about as useless as a gasogene.”

“A what?”

“Well then, as useless as any elaborate thing evolved for a specific purpose which no longer exists. A sedan chair, if you like. Prune has been bred, not merely brought
up, to be a suitable wife for a man who is no longer produced. She can't be altered and she can't be camouflaged. Besides—” he ground his heel into the stones irritably, “—her mother is a Gallantry, and therefore mad, of course, as they all are. Poor silly old thing, taking refuge in strange religions. At a guess, Prune has about one hundred and eighty pounds a year, less tax, to live on, and there's no sort of job in which she would be at all suitable. She makes me miserable whenever I think of her.”

“Charlie Luke has a mum too, hasn't he?”

“So he says.” In the darkness Mr. Campion grinned. “A power in his life by all accounts. According to him, she's a C.I.D. Sergeant's daughter, a Superintendent's widow, is two jam-pots high, and can smell breath over the telephone. I can't see her being sympathetic. Oh no, Amanda, I see bother there. Trouble. Tight lips. Broken hearts and God knows what. That sort of chap is liable to have mighty soul-shattering passions. That wretched girl is no darned good to him at all.”

Amanda sighed and the June moths floated by. “Poor Prune,” she murmured. “I hope they saw the otter. I say Albert, what about Lugg?”

“Lugg is a witness in this scarifying murder enquiry which everybody is taking a darned sight too calmly. I imagine he's still with the police.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” said Amanda, “because I heard he was in The Gauntlett with someone else's old woman. His Knees up Mother Brown is said to be a sight worth drinking Honesty Bull's dreary beer for.”

Mr. Campion's eyes grew wide behind his spectacles and it occurred to him that he had not seen Miss Diane all the evening. He turned to the crisp head so near his own.

“Dognosed anything else, lieutenant?”

“Not much. I am in the process of collecting data. The old man whose old woman has been appropriated by Lugg is called rather ominously Old Harry. He's been working up here on the wherry but he sheered off at six o'clock and Scat told me why. He's gone with them.”

“Always the best way.”

Mr. Campion sounded considerably relieved. “What's he like? I thought his name was Buller.”

“So it is. Old Harry Buller. He's one of those tough little country chaps who have pink cheeks and a way of spreading their eyelids modestly downwards, which means they're not going to tell you anything they don't intend to. He's ‘retired', and that means he does anything he's a mind to. He cures rabbit-skins, cuts the odd hedge for favoured customers, helps Minnie shift things about. There's a lot of shifting about on this estate, there always was. And he's the only man in the entire county, including the Borough Surveyor, who knows how the Pontisbright sewer is laid. He's also the bird-catcher. Scat says he's practically a dog.”

“Eh?” said Mr. Campion, taken aback.

Amanda chuckled. She was as gay as he had ever known her.

“He goes by instinct,” she explained. “Smells things out. He knew Lugg had designs on his girl friend merely by seeing the top of his head over a hedge. It's all a little indelicate. They must all be in the sixties, if not more.”

“I don't know what the old are coming to,” Mr. Campion spoke lightly. “It's telling them they've got to work until they drop, I suppose. Puts ideas in their heads. Anything more about the possible future of the Pontisbright Park Estate?”

“No. I was on that when you came along, worrying about Luke and wanting your letter posted. You sent something to Pritchard, I saw. What has got to be analysed?”

Mr. Campion glanced at her in the moonlight. “A small white tablet which I stole from Uncle William's room.”

“I see,” she said softly. “And you called the death of the tramp, or whoever he was, scarifying. Does that mean you think he must have something to do with this house?”

Mr. Campion bowed his head over his loosely clasped hands.

“I don't know anything, yet,” he said, “but I just can't believe that two mysterious killings, taking place within half a mile of each other at approximately the same time, are completely unrelated. Can you?”

Amanda surveyed the graceful silhouette of The Beckoning Lady against the depthless sky.

“I can't believe in murders here at all,” she said. “Everyone is so happy. The party seems to be the only thing that matters. I hate it, Albert. It's all wrong here.”