Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories (12 page)

Mr. Campion glanced round the spacious room, its walls lined with cue-racks and an occasional bookcase.

“All of which leaves us with the lame marker, I take it,” he ventured.

“The perishing little fool!” The Superintendent exploded, “He isn’t helping. He’s gone to pieces and is trying to say he hasn’t been here this afternoon. He lives in the mews at the back of the building, and he’s trying to say he played hooky after lunch today—says he thought no one would be in to play. Actually anyone can see what did happen. He dropped in, found Fenderson didn’t want a game, and went out again very sensibly. Now he doesn’t want to appear as the last man to see the poor chap alive. I’ve told him he’s doing himself no good by lying. Hang it all. Bowser
saw
him.”

“And so…?”

“And so there must be another way into this room, but I’m damned if I see it.” The Superintendent stalked over to the windows again and Campion stood watching him.

“I’d like a word with Bowser,” he murmured at last.

“Have it. Have it by all means.” Oates was exasperated. “I’ve put him through it very thoroughly. You’ll never shake him.”

Campion said nothing, but waited until the doorkeeper came in a few minutes later, stalking gravely behind the sergeant who had been sent to fetch him. Bowser was a typical man of trust, a little shaky now and in his seventies, but still an imposing figure with a wooden expression on a proud old face, chiefly remarkable for its firm mouth and bristling white eyebrows. He glowered at Campion and did not speak, but at the first question a faint smile softened his lips.

“How many times have I seen Chetty come into the club in my life, sir? Why, I shouldn’t like to say—several thousand, must be.”

“Has he always been lame?”

“Why yes, sir. It’s a deformity of the hip he’s had all his life. He couldn’t have done this, sir, any more than I could—neither of us has the strength.”

“I see.” Mr. Campion went over to a bookcase at the far end of the long room and came back presently with something in his hand.

“Mr. Bowser,” he said slowly, “look at this. I suggest to you that it is a photograph of the man you really saw come in and go out of the club this afternoon when Mr. Fenderson was already here.”

The old man’s hand shook so violently that he could scarcely take the sheet, but he seized it at last and with an effort held it steady. He stared at it for a long time before returning it.

“No sir,” he said firmly, “that face is unknown to me. Chetty came in and went out. No one else, and that’s the truth, sir.”

“I believe you think it is, Bowser.” Mr. Campion spoke gendy and his lean face wore a curious expression in which pity predominated. “Here’s your unseen door, Superintendent,” he spoke softly. Oates snatched the paper and turned it over.

“Good God! What’s this?” he demanded. “It’s a blank brown page—from the back of a book, isn’t it?”

Mr. Campion met his eyes.

“Bowser has just told us it’s a face he doesn’t know,” he murmured. “You see, Oates, Bowser doesn’t recognise faces, he recognises voices. That’s why he glares until people speak. Bowser didn’t
see
Chetty this afternoon, he heard his very distinctive step—a step which Merton could imitate very easily. I fancy you’ll find that when there was that little unpleasantness earlier in the year, Merton guessed something which no one else in the club has known. When did it come on, Bowser?”

The old man stood trembling before them.

“I—I didn’t want to have to retire from the club, sir,” he blurted out pathetically. “I knew everyone’s voice. I could still do my work. It’s only got really bad in the last six months—my daughter comes and fetches me home at night. It
was
Chetty’s step, sir, and I knew he could never have done it.”

“Blind!” The word escaped the Superintendent huskily. “Good Lord! Campion, how did you know?”

It was some time before Mr. Campion could be prevailed upon to tell him, and when he did he was slightly diffident.

“When I first passed through the hall,” he said, “Bowser glared at me as I told you, but as I came upstairs I heard him say to a constable: ‘Another detective, I suppose?”.”

He paused, and his smile was engaging as he flicked an imaginary speck from an immaculate sleeve.

“I wondered then if there was something queer about his eyesight—no offence, of course, no offence in the world.”

I bought the cage for a bird which never came. My young nephew promised me a parrot and wrote to me from Teneriffe to say it was on its way. A psittacosis scare plus the authorities, however, combined to frustrate his generosity.

It was during the period between the letter from Peter and the disappointing official communication that I acquired the cage and had it sent up to my flat. Even in appearance it was no ordinary contraption. I have a struggling weakness for the baroque and when I saw the lovely monstrosity, part pagoda, part miniature bandstand, hanging in the window of my favourite junk shop I went in and bought it hastily before my good sense could curb my enthusiasm.

In the living-room of my flat it appeared even more arresting than it had done in Robb’s shop. It was very large, for one thing, much larger than I had suspected, and it took up the whole of the circular table in the corner by the second window. There was no other place to put it, and finally it remained there looking very odd beside my prim bookcases and restrained prints: even I was a little taken aback.

I thought perhaps my Roman shawl might cover the cage until Polly or Oliver put in an appearance. After all, bird-cages are frequently covered at night.

I had to go out that evening until a little after nine o’clock, but when I returned I got out the shawl and draped it over the cage. It looked charming, I thought. The brilliant stripes of colour were just what that rather dull corner needed.

Having admired the effect, I sat down at my bureau to correct some proofs. It was an early autumn evening and my windows were closed against the sharpness in the air. The square below is always quiet, but that evening it was silent, and no sound of traffic reached me over the tops of the plane trees, which were casting their last leaves against the violet sky.

I had corrected two galleys and was beginning the third when the thing happened. Behind me in the room someone coughed.

It was not a faint sound, nothing that could be explained away by a mouse in the skirting or a loose window sash: it was a cough, human, personal and very loud, a cough of definite utility. I swung round, my pencil in my hand. Let me say at once that I am not a nervous woman. If I hear a noise at night I take a torch and investigate. My first feeling, I remember, was one of resentment at having my privacy disturbed. Then I saw that my room was still empty.

I got up resolutely. No one in my family has ever suffered from hallucinations and I was disturbed. The whole thing would have to be explained.

I was halfway across the room to the other window to see whether by some trick of acoustics the sound could have been projected into the room from the square below when the second thing happened.

“Dear-est,” said a charming, feminine voice which yet had more than a trace of exasperation in it,
“must
you?”

I own I stood petrified. The voice was so near.

“Must,” replied a male voice and giggled.

It was the giggle which paralysed me. It was so authentic, if I may use such a term, so obviously some real person’s private, individual giggle, and it was beside me in my ear.

“Brute,” answered the woman’s voice faintly.

Then there came another sound, the unmistakable rustling of feathers. I stared at the gaudy mound on the round table. The folds of the shawl did not move, but from beneath them came a quiet bird whistle, ending in a rather imperfect replica of a human sneeze.

Instantly my mind seized on an explanation, improbable enough, but better than the one I was forced to accept afterwards. I whipped off the shawl fully expecting a miracle to have occurred and a beady black eye in a wicked grey head to confront me.

To say I was disappointed is a ridiculous under-statement. The cage was just as I had last seen it, clean, empty and rather vulgarly ornate.

I stood for some time, the shawl in my hand. The room was quiet and normal. The electric fire glowed warmly.

Throwing the shawl upon a chair, I went out to the kitchenette and did a thing I very rarely do at night. I made myself a cup of tea. There is a little mirror over the sink and I caught sight of my face in it. The sight shocked me into my senses again. I looked haggard and as though I had seen a ghost, whereas, of course, I knew I had merely been the victim of some foolish practical joke.

I went back to the living-room at last, my mind full of hidden radios and concealed tape recorders. I certainly made a thorough search. I found nothing at all. The room was just as it had always been. My somewhat austere type of furnishing, a relic of my Cambridge days, afforded very few hiding places.

Thoroughly alarmed, I decided to go to bed at once and call in upon my doctor in the morning. I threw the shawl over the cage again and bent to switch off the fire.

“George—really! I might as well be married to an ape…”

The woman’s voice, so charming and distinctive with its slight Scots accent, arrested me in the very act of stooping and I remained crouching over the stove, the hairs prickling on my scalp.

“Un-apeily married,” replied the male voice which I had heard before. It spoke with idiotic relish and chuckled again.

This time the laughter ended abruptly, and an obviously parrot voice remarked hoarsely:

“My name is John Wellington Wells,” adding immediately a collection of shrill whistles, a cuckoo call and a realistic hiccup.

Now thoroughly frightened, but preserving, thank heavens, a modicum of common sense, I got up from the hearthrug and advanced stealthily upon the cage. There was no doubt about it—the voices came from beneath the shawl.

Even as I approached I could hear the thing, whatever it was, preparing its ghastly impersonations.

“George dar-Iing…” It was the woman’s voice this time, perfectly reproduced in every intonation, I felt sure.

Cautiously I raised a corner of the shawl and peered beneath. There was a squawk of rage, a rattle, and then silence. The cage was empty. I saw nothing, not even a shadow.

Alone in my sitting-room with my skin creeping, I made a series of experiments. Looking back on it I know it was one of the most dreadful hours I have spent, but I am a strong-minded woman and I did not go to my room until I had found out the all-significant fact and had proved it.

The manifestation, or whatever you care to call it, only occurred when the cage was covered. It was nothing to do with the shawl. A blanket served equally well. Light did not seem to affect it, nor did position. As soon as the cage was covered the dreadful idiot parrot voice within began again.

There were no more impersonations that evening, only whistles, catcalls and three lines of a hymn repeated in a sing-song.

At last I took myself in hand. I left the cage uncovered and passed a fitful night in my bedroom behind a locked door.

The following day I could not bring myself to confide in anyone. Frankly, I did not fancy the task of telling such an utterly ridiculous story.

As soon as I was alone in the flat, after the daily woman had left, I got out the shawl and covered the cage again. This time there was no result. The cage remained quiet.

My first feeling was one of intense relief, followed by extreme irritation with myself for permitting my imagination to run away with me. I went out to a lecture that night, still considerably shaken by what I could only feel was a very disturbing trick of the brain.

I arrived home a little after ten and as soon as I came into the hall I heard the two voices. I stood with my hand on the sitting-room latch, my heart thumping. My instinct was to turn and run for assistance, but there is an obstinate something in my nature which I can only call pride, and eventually I pulled myself together, opened the door and switched on the light.

A guilty silence greeted my arrival. The room was cold and empty. On the table stood the cage, covered by its multicoloured hood. I closed the door, and as I walked towards the table I distinctly heard the odd rasping noise that a parrot makes as it rubs its beak on the wood of its perch.

I had stretched up my hand to pull the shawl away when the voice within began to speak again. Never shall I forget that strange reported conversation. First of all the woman’s voice, soft, educated, endearing, and then the man’s, jovially wheezy and shaken now and again with foolish laughter.

“George, don’t—don’t. My dear, be serious for once. Be a little sensible. You’re not dignified, darling. You’re not even amusing. You’re silly.”

“Perhaps I come from the Scilly Isles.” This followed by the insufferable chuckle.

Then the woman’s voice again, near breaking-point this time.

“George, really, I can’t stand it! You’re such a fool. So puerile. I tell you I can’t stand it. These incessant lunatic jokes aren’t faintly funny. Dearest, pull yourself together.”

There was a pause, followed by an explosion of partly controlled laughter.

“Yo-ho, heave ho,” sang the male voice, and the parrot, or whatever it was, added a hoarse guffaw or two of its own.

“Really!…” There were tears in the woman’s voice and a dangerous edge of hysteria. “I can’t stand it any longer. I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do for months now. I knew you’d drive me to it in the end. My nerves have snapped, I tell you. Look, George, look, I’ve got a gun in my hand. Look at it! If I were to pull the trigger…”

“There’d be a loud report,” sang the male voice, quoting evidently, from some comic song.

“George, I’m going to—I’m going to—”

In its effort to reproduce the whispered exasperation in the feminine voice the bird whistled with ghastly effect.

The answering male giggle was positively insane in its stupidity.

“I’d rather have a nice cup of tea,” the voice sang.