The Beckoning Lady (6 page)

There was a brief silence.

“Not natural causes?”

“No. Blunt instrument. Perhaps not quite so blunt.”

“Very well.” There was a note of resignation in the pleasant voice. “The Superintendent will come down at once. Pussy's gone, you know, but we've got a new fellow called Fred South. He's been in the Urban area for years and is finishing his time with us. He's very intelligent and uncommonly quick by our standards. Where will he find you? Still with Minnie?”

Mr. Campion hesitated. “I was going to ask you about that,” he said. “Lugg actually found the body. I am on holiday—er—technically, and I wondered if I need be called as a witness?”

The Chief grunted. “That's the most suspicious thing I ever heard you say. Still, Lugg will do. Tell him to stick to his story.”

“Chief Inspector Charles Luke is staying with us,” Mr. Campion suggested diffidently. “I don't suppose for a moment that you'll want to call in the Yard, but if you do I thought you'd care to know that there's a good man already here.”

Leo showed unexpected interest. “Luke? I want to meet him, he's a brave chap, Campion. I read about it. A gallant officer. Nice type too, eh? Good. Well, I'll get South's report and if it warrants it I'll telephone London. I've been thinking. You know what this will turn out to be? Motorists.”

Mr. Campion's bewildered expression faded. “As opposed to local people who drive cars?” he suggested.

“Eh? Yes, that's what I said. Motorists. Terrible fellers from God knows where. Depend upon it, one of those has run down some poor feller, carted him for twenty miles or so, and then got rid of him. That's about it. What did you say?”

“I said it'd be a long way to carry him. He's lying half a mile from the road.”

“Is he?” Leo sounded unimpressed. “All the same, the Yard are the best people to deal with a killer of that kind. They've got the machinery, they know the type. Good-bye my boy. I hope we meet on Saturday. Good Lord yes, Poppy would never forgive me if anything happened to stop that.”

Mr. Campion sent his love to that plump and smiling lady who had once been the darling of the musical-comedy stage and had married Leo late in his widower-hood. He also took the opportunity to ask after Janet, Leo's daughter by his first wife. She had married a sort of friend of Campion's own, one Gilbert Whippet, now Chairman of the Mutual Ordered Life Endowment Insurance Company—”the Mole,” in the vernacular—and he heard with gratification that they too could be expected at the party. It promised to be quite a gathering.

As he hung up he glanced about him curiously. He found the entire room surprising, inasmuch as it appeared
to be his hostess's own. At any rate, the painted four-poster which he remembered from the studio in Clerkenwell quite twenty years before had been moved in here from the great sunlit chamber in the front of the house which she and Tonker had shared in the early days of her return to the country. All round the walls were treasures peculiarly Minnie's own. There was her father's head of a cherub, the exquisite Rushbury watercolour and Edmund Blampied's superb drawing of a farm horse, with ‘For Minnie on her birthday' inscribed under the signature. Campion looked for the famous caricature which Tom Chambers gave them, and found it on the other side of the bed. He went round to look at it again: “
The Eternal Charleston, Minnie and Tonker, 1928
.”

The drawing made him laugh now as it had then; Minnie, shown as more than half a mule with her long nose and wicked eye, was wearing a dress of the period, its short skirt made of the Union Jack and the long-waisted blouse of the Stars and Stripes. On her head was a brave's full head-dress, with paint brushes dripping where feathers should have been. It was wickedly like her, yet the masterpiece was Tonker. Tom had drawn Tiger Tim as he had appeared in the weekly comic paper of that name, and had apparently lifted the animal completely. There was the jaunty back, the overstuffed paws and the waving tail, yet every line of the figure was also irrefutably Tonker himself, truculent, sandy, and thinking of something dangerous to do. They were dancing, or fighting, and the dust rose in clouds from under their feet.

Mr. Campion was still contemplating it when the door was kicked open and a small woman came pattering in. She did not see him immediately because she was carrying a newly pressed dress on a hanger high in front of her, in an attempt to save its trailing hem, but as he swung round she heard him and peered across the bed. He saw it was Emma Bernadine.

Emma was a handmaid of the arts. When he had first met her she was painting children's white wood
tuck-boxes to look like pirate chests. In those days she had been a sly-eyed little party, much younger than the crowd which had grown up with Minnie, but she had strung along with them and, when Jake Bernadine's first wife had given up in despair, had married and mothered him, enjoyed his strange pictures, and had children by him. Just before the arrival of the twins they had borrowed the cottage on The Beckoning Lady estate for a summer holiday and, since the landlord of their Putney studio had taken that opportunity to distrain upon their goods, had not yet gone away again.

It was some years since Campion had set eyes on her and he saw with interest that she had become a type in the interim, stocky and cheerful and quite happy in the exhausted fashion of the times.

She was wearing a bright blue dress of coloured sheeting, embroidered across the shoulders with huge hand-worked flowers, a black sateen peasant apron, and rope-soled shoes, while her head was wrapped in a dinner napkin, cunningly creased as long ago in good houses they used to serve bread.

“Hullo,” she said, “why aren't you working?”

“I suppose people really do say things like that.” Mr. Campion sat down on the bed, since there was no chair.

“Get up, don't make a mess, be careful, look out.” She shooed him away as she spread the dress on the counterpane, and he looked at it dubiously. It was a minute print, grey on white, and seemed to be very plain.

“Minnie's, for the party. I made it. We hunted everywhere for the material and found it at last at the village shop. It must have been there in one of the stock drawers for seventy years. Ninepence a yard and we starched it. Isn't it nice?”

“Very,”he agreed and hunted for a word. “Restrained.”

She screwed up her eyes and stood looking at it. “Oh not bad, it will look odd, you know, and rather good.” She pulled a seam out carefully and stood back. “Jake is painting mine,” she remarked. “I sized a piece of calico
and ran it up, and he's doing his damnedest. I must get back before he decides it's too good to wear and cuts the skirt up to frame. Isn't it fun but isn't it exhausting! My feet . . . . . .”

Mr. Campion looked dismayed. “You make me feel elderly,” he said. “Is it still worth it?”

“Oh yes,” she assured him, her round face packed with earnestness. “It's our only chance of seeing anyone at all. It's
killing
while it lasts and the clearing up takes months, but at least one's alive for a few hours. You don't know what it's like down here in the winter, sweetie. Not a sound. Not a voice. Only you and the radio. I exist from one of Tonker's parties to the next.”

The conversation threatened to become emotional.

“I haven't seen Minnie yet,” he said, hastily. “I wanted to phone and someone in the kitchen sent me up here. I'm in her bedroom, I suppose?”

“You are. The telephone's here, you see. It's the only one. There's a bell in the front hall and when it rings you have to run like stink before the caller gives up. Perfectly insane but there you are! Have you seen the rooms I've redecorated for Minnie?”

She took his sleeve to hurry him and he found himself dragged first into Minnie's old bedroom and then into the smaller one beside it, where there had been a transformation. His first impression on revisiting the old house had been that it was shabby in the pleasant way in which old homes crumble, but in the two bedrooms now so proudly displayed a start had been made. They were a little arty in their sprigged chintz petticoats, even a little dated, but they looked comfortable and the beds were plump and new, and there was running water.

Emma looked round her and sighed. “Oh lovely,” she said earnestly.

“Pleasant,” he agreed. “Who sleeps here?”

“Just exactly who you'd think!” said Emma. “Nobody at all, of course. What a life, eh? So far round the bend we meet ourselves coming back. Run along. See you later.
I'm dying to talk but I haven't got time. Look up old Jake. He's doing some very new stuff. Ask about it. Don't just look.”

“I will.” He tried to sound enthusiastic and went off down the staircase. On the first landing there was a magnificent leaded window overlooking a flower garden and he paused to glance out at the blazing mass of colour. The drive was a little shaggy he had noticed coming along, and the kitchen garden was a wilderness. But here there was a display which would have done credit to a Dutch bulb-grower's catalogue. The effect was blinding; arches and trellises, vines and crawling roses, massed one on top of the other in ordered glory. The wide river, shallow as a ford, was almost obscured by the show. One small opening draped with clematis and lace-vine had been left, however, and as his eye was drawn towards it he saw Rupert pass by on the other side. He blinked. Unless he had been utterly deceived, the item clutched to his boiler-suited bosom had been a magnum of champagne. Campion saw the gleam of the gold paper distinctly. Before he had had time to clear his mind, another child passed the archway. She was a fat little person clad solely in yellow pants, and a squaw's single feather. She too carried a gaudy bottle. Behind her came a boy two or three years older, and behind him a girl in her early teens. They were all vaguely Red Indian in costume, and were all laden with the same sensational freight, which they carried with earnest concentration. The operation appeared to be secret and of a military character.

Campion was turning away when he saw two more laden children go by. A trifle dazed, he went on down the stairs. The door of the room which had been Minnie's mother's drawing-room was directly in front of him and he could not resist putting his head in to see the Cotman again. The white-panelled room was much as he remembered it, but the picture had gone. There was a flower-piece of Minnie's own in its place, but the magic watercolour, so passionate under its placidity, had vanished for
ever. Saddened, he pushed open the door of the old front kitchen which was now, it seemed, the family dining-room. There was a Swedish cooking-stove in place of the old range, a tiled floor, and an elm farm table scrubbed white and surrounded by innumerable stools. It was all very tidy and spartan and pleasant, and he passed on into the back kitchen where nothing, as far as he could see, had changed since the house was built. It was a dim, whitewashed shell of a place, very large, with a worn stone floor and a flat stone sink with a hand pump over it. Two doors, one leading into the garden and one into the yard, stood wide open, letting in the sunny air.

At work at the sink was the woman he had seen briefly before in his search for the telephone, and as he came drifting in she turned to give him a wide china smile.

“Found it, duck?” Her accent was as riotously cockney as Lugg's own, and as Campion glanced at her he thought she could have sprung from no other place. She was a mighty woman, tall as he was, and built on aggressive lines, like a battleship, with a square squat head to which the iron-grey hair was bound as tight as possible in an intricate mystery of tiny plaits. He guessed that she was in the sixties but she was powerful still, and hearty, with a merry eye and clear fresh shining skin. Her pinafore under the tweed apron, cut lightheartedly at some time from a pair of trousers, was gay to the point of silliness, and earrings as big as curtain rings, with a tin bird perching on each, brushed her plump shoulders where a wisp or two of hair which had escaped the plaits hung free.

The general effect was sobered a little by a black band suspiciously like the top of a woollen stocking, which was pinned to the short sleeve above an arm as thick and powerful as a navvy's. He suspected that she had been talking to herself, for as he appeared she went straight on, merely raising her voice to include him into the party. “It's not right, is it?” she was saying—“'Im 'ardly in 'is grave yet, poor old dear. We know 'e was old but then that's a thing we've all got to come to. Surely you can put
the Londoners' outin' off, dear, for a week or ten days? I said. No I can't, she said, and that's flat. You don't understand. We can't back out of it now. Can't? I said, there's no can't about it. Oh shut up! Dinah, she said. They call me Dinah, though me name's Diane. Miss Diane Varley. I've never bin married. But Mrs. Cassands
was
upset. I could see it, though some people couldn't. Well, she would be. 'E was like a father to 'er and me. We was just 'is girls to 'im. I'm speaking of 'er uncle, Mr. William that was, a saint on earth except for 'is bottle.”

Mr. Campion, whose face had been growing more and more blank, took himself in hand. One item in the harangue stood out as an insult to his intelligence. He knew for a fact that this sterling example of a type which was as familiar to him as the city itself, could never have escaped matrimony. Glancing at her left hand he saw at once the bone-deep crease of the wedding ring. Fortunately she was wiping her eyes with the corner of the tweed apron and did not notice his stare.

“Oh I miss 'im,” she said brokenly. “I've cried meself sick every night. Bleary old nuisance, 'e was, and I've told 'im so until I was sick of it. I know 'e was lucky to be took so quick. Sometimes they lie and lie. But all the same it was sudden. Old Harry was here, and we was sitting up. We 'adn't gorn 'ome because Mr. Will seemed queer and I didn't like to leave 'im to Mrs. Cassands while Mr. Tonker was down. She doesn't 'ave a lot of time with 'im. Just before twelve I said to Harry—that's my friend—I said ‘I'll take 'im some of this 'ere tea, because 'e may wake up and then 'e'll want it.' So I did, and I went in talking like I always do. ‘There you are, you old lump of love,' I said, ‘nice and 'ot,' and I turned up the light and then of course I dropped the cup.”