Coroner's Pidgin (14 page)

He was gone before either of them realized it, and the door snapped shut behind him. Eve did not speak, and Campion had re-seated himself on the couch a few feet away from her before he realized that she was crying. He got up and dropped a hand on her shoulder.

“I think I'd better clear off,” he said awkwardly. “Lots to do, and all that.”

“No, stay. Stay, Albert. I must talk to somebody with sense.” The squeaky voice was urgent. “Darling, tell me, do you think the strain—the war strain, I mean, quite apart from this other awful thing—has got him
right
down?” The face she turned to him, multi-coloured and shining, and tragic, was still miraculously attractive. Her big, honey-coloured eyes were devastatingly sincere.

Campion hesitated. “You mean, do I think the old lad's nuts?” he enquired bluntly.

“Yes, I've been wondering that.”

Campion looked round but Mrs. Phipps had bounded off behind a screen in the corner and presumably considered herself absent.

“No,” he said. “I think he's got the wind up at the moment, and I think he's worried. But he'll snap out of it. It's an alarming business, you know. Lady Carados tipped it over the edge into the frightful by heaving the body about like that. She's a little odd these days, I should say. It's very nerve-racking for Johnny.”

“Of course it is,” she agreed, wiping off the grease and her tears with it. “Of course it is, my dear, but I'm not thinking of the murder. Not only of that. It's all the other things I mean. It must have been coming on slowly for a long time, and I never knew.”

“What other things?” enquired Campion.

Eve did not look at him. “Well, his marriage, for one
thing,” she said in a burst of frankness. “He's not in love with that child, Albert, and he never has been in love with her. I didn't believe it of course when he first told me. I thought she was young and lovely and that he had lost his head over her in a perfectly healthy way; I didn't blame him, you know, I didn't really. That sort of thing does happen, and that's all there is to it. But now I see he's been telling the truth. He doesn't love her, Albert, and he never has loved her.”

“I don't see that proves him barmy.” Mr. Campion realized he was floundering in delicate flower-beds, but saw no way of avoiding them.

“But he was going to marry her,” the woman insisted. “He was going to marry her because he'd promised her young husband to look after her. That's insane, really insane. Mad, I mean. You can't imagine any modern man in his senses, anybody not in a book, doing that, can you? Not here in England, certainly not Johnny.”

She began on her face again with swift, practised artistry, more than half her mind on the work.

“He broke my heart but it didn't frighten me when I thought he was in love,” she said. “Now I really do see he's not and never has been, I'm terrified. He's unbalanced, what else can it mean?”

Mr. Campion regarded her helplessly. He saw her as she was; shrewd, kind and above all, adult. He could appreciate her bewilderment but hesitated to point out that in a rapidly changing world she was just a little old-fashioned. All the same, he felt it his duty to attempt an explanation. It was a laborious business, and she let him speak uninterrupted for a minute or so. Suddenly he exasperated her.

“Two worlds,” she repeated after him, her voice rising in her indignation. “You too! What's the matter with you all? If you tell me you're ‘at war' I—I'll hit you, Albert. Good God, aren't we all at war?”

Mr. Campion sat quiet, and thought about his train, and the green meadows beyond its furthest journey. Eve laughed.

“Sorry, darling,” she said. “It's all too—too near the heart,
I'm afraid. I'm not reliable at the moment. I'll see what you mean in time.” Presently she added pathetically:

“He's so angry with me, Albert.”

“Is he?”

“Uh-huh. Furious. Furious with us all, it's so unlike him. Isn't it called ‘persecution mania'? He thinks we're all in some conspiracy against him.”

“To prevent the wedding?”

“Yes. That, and—oh, it must be only that. After all, that's enough.”

Mr. Campion was frowning. “Did you think there might be something else?” he asked at last.

Eve was busy with an eyebrow pencil. “I wondered,” she said without taking her eyes from the mirror.

“Why did you introduce Susan to young Evers?” said Campion suddenly.

“Me?” She put down the pencil and turned to face him. “I don't think I did, did I?”

“She says so. At a party, at the Minoan.”

“So that's where I'd seen her before.” Eve was relieved. “That's right. She came with a crowd Gwenda brought along. Gwenda's always bringing people. So I introduced them, did I? Quite likely. I was hostess.”

“It wasn't part of a plot between you and Gwenda?”

“To get the girl interested in someone her own age? My dear boy!” Eve turned her back on him and went on with her dressing while Campion sat thinking. After nearly twenty-four hours of completely inconsequential happenings, he thought he was beginning to detect a faint, illusive, spider strand of sense in their history.

“Nobody,” he said, “nobody ever killed anyone simply in order to provide an awkward corpse in someone else's house. I'm not sure of much, but I am of that. Nor do I believe that a deliberate murder is ever done for the sole purpose of providing evidence against a third person. There aren't many rules, but one of them is that the killer wishes the victim dead. Eve, my dear, do you know anything about an artificial rose and some Woolworth pearls?”

“A rose?”

He remembered she was an actress, but her surprise convinced him.

“An artificial rose, and a great rope of candlegrease peas.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. What is this, some sort of trick? You're frightening me, Albert.”

“I don't mean to, and there's nothing up my sleeve. Only one more question. What kind of woman is Gwenda?”

“Gwenda?” Eve began to laugh. “You're absurd. Gwenda is the silliest, woolliest little rabbit in the world. I've known her for years. Gwenda's always rushing about in a self-important panic trying to do something someone else has told her to do, and thinking she's blazing a trail.”

Mrs. Phipps interrupted her with a reminder of the time, and she submitted to a cloud of net which was passed over her head. As she emerged into the light again and the dresser knelt before her pulling out the folds of her skirt. Campion looked into her face.

“You dined with Johnny at the Minoan on the night Moppet was killed,” he said. “Did he stay with you all the evening?”

Eve returned his stare. Her face, which possessed so much more than beauty, was very serious. “I don't know how you know, but the answer is, every minute of the time,” she said deliberately. “Every minute until morning.”

He hesitated. “It may be rather awkward if you have to swear that,” he murmured.

“I can't help it, I should swear it.”

“However mad he is?” he ventured.

Eve closed her eyes. “Don't, darling,” she said.

“All right, I won't. But think what you're doing.”

“I do,” she whispered, “all the time.”

Mr. Campion left the theatre. So Johnny Carados had an alibi; if it was genuine or not, Eve was sufficiently in love with him to risk everything she considered important to give him it. It was very interesting, and all the more so because the longer he thought about it the more convinced he was that whoever had killed Moppet Stavros, it was not Johnny Carados.

Meanwhile, the trains went by.

WHEN MR. CAMPION
walked into the Minoan that evening the first person he saw, sitting demurely at a table by himself, was his uncle, the Bishop of Devizes. Mr. Campion's mother, who had ever been a warrior, not to say a whole panzer division of the Church Militant, had used in her lifetime to speak resentfully of her brother-in-law. She said he was both timid and obstinate, yet in his own domain he was definitely known to be neither. He was a tiny person, soft-voiced and gentle, with the bluest eyes seen out of Scandinavia; but it was typical of him that at that moment it was not he, but the Minoan, which appeared a little out of place.

When Campion presented himself, he was delighted.

“My dear boy,” he said, when the preliminary greetings were complete. “How very pleasant to see you here. I was afraid I was hardly going to see a face I knew this evening; it must be ten years since I ate outside my own Club when visiting London. This place looks very clean.”

It was a most kindly meant observation, but Mr. Campion felt any debt the Minoan owed him was repaid.

“The Parnassus is still on its pillars, I hope, sir?” he enquired.

“The Club? Oh, yes, I've just come from there. Yes, indeed, I wonder if I'm a little early.” He consulted a very thin gold watch, and tucked it back in the folds of black silk. “Two minutes,” he said, adding with a sudden mischievous glance, unexpected in one so patently innocent, “you wonder what I'm up to, don't you? I'll tell you something, my boy, so do I.”

Inspiration came to Mr. Campion, and a large new section of the jig-saw slid neatly into place.

“You wouldn't be about to give your opinion on a bottle of wine by any chance?” he ventured.

The Bishop raised his fine eyebrows. “Ah, so you're in the party. I'm glad of that, very sensible of them. It's a most extraordinary business, don't you think?”

It was the second time that day that someone whom Mr.
Campion would have supposed to have something better to excite him had professed the same enthusiasm for the mysterious bottle. This time, however, he was not quite so astonished.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “I imagine it is.”

The old man laughed his gentle little laugh which had made so many people his slaves in his long life.

“You're so much more used to this sort of thing than I am,” he said. It was not exactly regret in his voice, but the hint of it was there. As an observation it was true; if his uncle meant what Campion thought it did. He felt mildly irritated with Bush for dragging the old man into such a business.

“I would come, you know,” said the Bishop of Devizes, who appeared to add thought-reading to his other accomplishments. “Theodore Bush came to see me last week and I told him I insisted on being present. We must all do what we can in a case like this.”

Mr. Campion gave it up. He could imagine Theo going to Devizes, or indeed to Durbar on the Day of Judgment about a purloined case or so of wine, but that his uncle should come to the Minoan in war time on the same business seemed incredible.

“I don't think I can have got the full story,” he said.

“Then wait,” said the Bishop. “Wait. Now, is that young man over there our host?”

Campion looked round to see Don Evers standing in the doorway leading to the private part of the building. He smiled at them, and came over. It was evident that he did not know the Bishop, and that he knew rather less than Mr. Campion of the matter in hand. However, there were no explanations. The Bishop was charming and amazingly adroit. He made it clear that he had come up from Devizes to dine with a young man he had never met, having been invited to do so by a third party not yet present, and he refused to see anything unusual in the proceeding. But he would not refer to the now tantalizing bottle, nor allow anyone else to do so. His small talk was masterly, and to
Campion's relief, Don appeared to like him after a certain initial bewilderment.

“We're eating upstairs,” said the boy at last. “I thought Bush would be here, but I don't see him yet. Should we go up and let him follow us?”

“I really think we might. Young Carados is to come too, isn't he?”

Mr. Campion's uncle was already advancing down the room, his silver head bobbing against Don's shoulder.

“Do you know Carados, Lieutenant Evers? A most remarkable young man. Very strong in character. A little autocratic, perhaps, but a figure; definitely a figure of our times.”

Campion who was following them saw the colour rise in Don's face, and was sorry for him. For a man whose only indiscretion appeared to be that he had told his father he had bought a bottle of Burgundy, his punishment seemed unduly severe.

The room they entered was the one in which Stavros had made his tragic statement that morning. It was brighter now, and warm; the lights were comforting and the silver shone. Campion was wondering what had happened to the man when he saw him. He was standing staring down at the table which had been set for five. His head was bowed and he seemed to have shrunk so that his clothes sagged a little. He did not notice Campion immediately. Don and the Bishop were in front of him and Stavros stepped back, bowing slightly. However as he raised his head he came face to face with the thin man in the horn-rimmed spectacles. He was astounded and afterwards afraid. His professional calm deserted him, and colour appeared in patches in his grey face. For an instant he dithered, and then turned impulsively towards a corner of the room as if he were about to rush to it protectingly.

Campion followed his glance, and saw two bottles; two very ordinary black bottles with their corks as yet undrawn. As he looked, Don went over to him.

“I'm in a dilemma, sir,” he said to the Bishop. “Mr. Bush gave me precise instructions that these corks should
not be drawn until we were all present, but although I don't pretend to be an expert I do feel that if we're to drink the stuff tonight it ought to be decanted very soon. What do you think?”

Stavros hurried over and murmured something to him. Don took up one of the bottles very carefully and glanced at it.

“No,” he said, “no. It's quite all right, Mr. Stavros, there's no mistake. This is it.
Les Enfants Doux,
nineteen hundred and four. I remember that ink scribble, too. Could you send me a corkscrew and a couple of decanters?”