Case with 4 Clowns Page 2

  “—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.”

  “An admirably open mind on the subject,” commented Jackson, with a slight smile. “And what do you wish me to do? You have told me that there is the possibility of a murder being committed in my circus. That, as you must realize, must be avoided at all costs. It would have a very bad effect on my business. But you must also realize that a circus would be the easiest place in which to commit a murder—and get away with it.”

  “How’s that?” asked Beef.

  “Every turn in the ring has a certain danger attached to it, and an unforeseen accident at almost any point might be fatal to the artist concerned. Then again there are the animals which are a constant danger to the trainers and the feeders. So that even if a murder did take place, I think you would find it very difficult, Mr. Beef, to prove that it had indeed been a murder. For myself,” he continued pleasantly, with an expressive movement of his shoulders, “I do not care very much about such things so long as they do not affect the circus—and also, of course, so long as my own person is not t
he subject of the experiment.”

  It struck me as he said these words that he was being neither flippant nor cold-blooded. I suspected that in his clear, precise, business-like mind he had already rejected Beef’s story as the uttermost nonsense, while at the same time looking at the question from another point of view.

  “And if I stayed with the circus for a bit,” Beef went on, “I could keep my eyes open and see that nothing out of the ordinary went on, couldn’t I?”

  Jackson smiled. “What qualifications have you for such a job?” he asked coldly.

  Beef bridled. “Well, after solving three murder mysteries already what no one else could solve, and after years of experience as a sergeant in the Force, I should think I knew how to keep a lookout for a possible murderer.”

  “Quite honestly,” said Jackson, after a pause, “it makes very little difference to me whether you gentlemen tour round with the circus or whether you don’t. You would, of course, pay your own expenses …”

  “Of course,” echoed Beef.

  “… so that the question hardly affects me. To tell you the truth, the whole affair sounds to me rather fantastic, but,” he waved his hand in the air, “if you wish to proceed with it …”

  Beef was a little damped by this frankness, but he recovered himself in time to ask whether there was a tent or an empty wagon which we could use while with the circus.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Jackson, “there is an empty wagon which I’d been thinking of selling. I could hire that out to you for a time if you liked. Of course, there are no blankets or crockery in it now. But there’s a couple of bunks, and some chairs and a table, I think. The knife-throwing act used to live in it until they split.”

  “I’ve always wanted to see a knife-throwing act,” said Beef naïvely. “Why did they split up?”

  Jackson smiled. “He wasn’t a very good knife-thrower,” he said, and left us to guess the rest.

  As we left Jackson’s wagon. Albert suddenly turned to Beef. “There’s something I’d clean forgotten,” he said suddenly. “When I asked old Margot when all this was going to happen, she said it would come off before the end of four weeks.”

  Beef opened his notebook and produced Albert’s letter. “You wrote this,” he commented, “on the fourteenth of April. How long before you wrote this did Margot tell your fortune?”

  “I can’t remember that far back,” said Albert.

  “Well, what week was it?”

  “Must have been just over the week before I wrote.”

  “Do you remember the day?”

  Albert thought for a minute, and then: “Yes, it must have been the Saturday. I remember we were one day out of Grimsby, so that makes it Saturday all right.”

  I referred quickly to my diary. “In that case,” I said, “it must have been the fifth of April when you heard all this.”

  “I expect so,” said Albert. “I know it was a Saturday because …”

  “We heard that last time,” said Beef abruptly, and Albert subsided meekly into silence.

  CHAPTER III

  I WAS awakened next morning before it was light by the sound of shouting and lorry engines being started. I prodded Beef sharply, but he refused to wake up, turning his face to the side of the wagon and burying his head under the blankets with a groan. One of us, I realized, had to get up before the circus moved on to the next camping-place. The trailer we were using as a living-wagon would be hitched on to one of the lorries, but my car had to be driven on separately. It was in something of a bad humor that I stepped out on to the bare, cold boards and began to dress.

  The scene of last night’s camp presented a complete change. The big top had been packed away on the lorries; the elephant tent had disappeared; the Wild Animal Zoo had been transformed into neat wagons and trailers waiting to start. The elephants had been sent on some time before, traveling on foot with one man to look after them—a job usually, I learned later, assigned to Tug, the hunchback. There was a strong smell of gasoline fumes in the air which bit sharply at the back of my throat.

  One large lorry was being backed slowly and cautiously over the turf towards our trailer. Ginger, the top half of his body leaning out of the driving-cab, waved cheerfully at me.

  “Where’s Uncle?” he shouted. I did not immediately realize that he was referring to Beef. It was a nickname, I reflected, that would probably stick to Beef for good.

  “Asleep inside,” I replied. “Shall I wake him?”

  “No, that’s all right. We’ll tow your trailer along just as it is. I’ll try not to disturb his beauty sleep too much,” he added.

  In a few minutes the trailer was securely hitched up to the lorry, and I watched the sleeping Beef being drawn out of the field and join the tail of the long, colored procession of circus wagons already on the move.

  It was the last one, and looking round I saw that the field was empty now except for my car and one old-fashioned caravan over by the far hedge, and between the shafts of which stood an ancient horse. Unlike the motor-driven, paint-smart, streamlined buses and trailers that the others in the circus were using, this wagon was one of the old traditional gypsy type which have always represented the Romany in book illustrations of the more romantic sort of story. It was painted a brilliant red with intricate carvings under the eaves of its railway-carriage roof. I had seen wagons like this often before; on the main roads back from Kent at the end of the hopping season; on the Downs at Epsom; in some little deserted lane off the Great North Road. In fact, I had imagined that the circus people lived in similar vehicles until I had seen the up-to-dateness of the huge converted buses and four-wheeled trailers standing around the big tent the night before. A light curl of smoke wandered slowly out of the narrow tin chimney, but otherwise there was no sign nor sound of life from it.

  “Good morning,” said a pleasant voice at my elbow. “Are you an artist or a writer?”

  I turned sharply to find myself staring at a tall, dark girl who must have been standing close behind me for some moments. She was extremely attractive, even at that hour of the morning, with dark, emphasized features and black wavy hair. The long nose, small pointed chin and almost violet eyes gave her a Latin appearance, although she was dressed in smart, and very English, riding-breeches and white shirt.

  “Must I be one or the other?” I asked, evading the question.

  “They mostly are.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Oh, the people who travel with us for a time. There’s always somebody following us around, either painting pictures of people in the ring, of the wagons or the horses, or writing books and stories about circus life. Boris Bleane, the novelist, was with us for a month or so last season, and he wrote in his last book that we were a people ‘living precariously on the bedraggled hem of that gown which Dame Nature calls her Civilization Dress.’ ”

  I laughed. “You’re something to do with the circus then?” I asked.

  The girl spread her arms above her head in a characteristic ring gesture. “I’m Gypsy Margot’s daughter,” she said, with mock gravity, “but I’m also one of the Concinis—my sister and I do a riding act together.”

  At that moment a bent figure emerged from the wagon at the far side of the field and began to beckon to the girl calling: “Anita, Anita.”

  “My mother,” explained the girl. “You must come and see our act some time,” and she turned and walked quickly across the field away from me.

  There had been a peculiar tinge of condescension in her voice when she had explained that the beckoning figure was her mother. As I started up the car I wondered vaguely what it had signified. Nothing very important probably, and yet since I was here with Jacobi’s Circus helping Beef to investigate a possible murder, it was only following the correct line laid down by my elders and betters in my profession to “wonder vaguely” about anything which did not present a completely innocent and normal face.

  I had to pull up at the gate of the field to allow the red gypsy w
agon to draw out on to the road. As I drew level the face of Anita appeared at the window and grinned cheerfully at me. Then, like a reflection in a mirror, a second face appeared beside hers, and the two girls waved to me as I drove past. I had not been warned that the Concinis were twins, and I was slightly bewildered as I drove on ahead to the next camping-place. Beef’s cases had been quite complicated enough up to now without the added Shakespearian complexity of twins, and I foresaw an almost inevitably bewildered Beef, who would certainly never be able to avoid making a fool of himself in a situation like this.

  The Sergeant, however, was completely unconscious of this, for when in half an hour’s time I climbed into his wagon again he was just sitting up on the edge of his bunk and sleepily scratching his head.

  “I thought,” he said, yawning, “these people got up early. It’s half-past eight already.” And pushing his watch back under the pillow, he rose slowly to his feet and drew aside the curtains.

  “Wouldn’t hardly have thought it possible,” he said ruminatively, after a prolonged stare out of the window.

  “What?” I queried suspiciously.

  “Nature’s a marvelous thing,” he said. “Now look at that bed of nettles over there. It wasn’t there last night. Just simply shot up from nothing. Marvelous I call it.”

  It may have been the fact that I had not yet had breakfast which made me say abruptly: “We moved while you were asleep,” rather than give the painstaking explanation of this phenomenon which was expected of me. In any case, I thought I detected a faint glint of mockery in Beef’s eye which warned me not to take his remarks at their face value.

  “And now,” he said, when we had finished our meal and his pipe was drawing well, “the question is, where do we start?”

  I explained to him briefly what had already occurred that morning while he had been asleep.

  “Twins, eh?” he said. “Awkward sort of Do, that is. I got a cousin who married a chap called Fred Gomme. Couldn’t tell him apart from his brother except when they were together. Caused her any amount of trouble that did until Fred fell downstairs one day and broke his nose. Only thing that stopped a divorce, she used to say.” And Beef gave one of his loud unexpected guffaws which he seemed to reserve for his own stories.