Coroner's Pidgin Page 12

  Mr. Campion looked up. “You had three cases of Les Enfants Doux in the lorry which got lost when the Museum of Wine was evacuated, hadn’t you?” he said.

  “I had. You know the story then?”

  “No, I don’t. All I know is that there was such a lorry. Bush told me so this morning.”

  “Ah. And do you know of it, Lieutenant?”

  “No. I never heard of the Museum even.”

  The Bishop was happy to explain. After some considerable preliminaries he got down to the main story.

  “This lorry went out of London during the second big raid in September, nineteen forty,” he said, his beautiful precise voice lingering on the words. “Poor Bush had left things dangerously late, silly fellow. He realizes that now. The lorry carried the most valuable exhibits in the entire Museum; the Gyrth Chalice was there and the Arthurian Vase, priceless things, both of them, as well as a great deal more, and also by way of make-weight, I suppose, the two cases of my Les Enfants. This lorry was last seen turning into Theobald’s Road while the raid was actually in progress. Its path lay through that part of the City which was very badly damaged that night. It never reached its destination, and neither the driver nor his mate, both reputable men with wives and families, was ever seen again.”

  “Were the bodies found?” enquired Campion with entirely new interest.

  “There’s a great deal of uncertainty about it.” The Bishop found the tale painful and his bright blue eyes were cold and angry. “The remains of many lorries were found in London after that night, several of them under buildings which had collapsed on them. Three were never claimed; one of these did contain two charred corpses, but complete scientific identification was never possible and there was no trace of any of the Museum’s property. Finally it was assumed that this lorry had belonged to the Museum and all it contained was written off as a total loss. In other circumstances the enquiry might have been more thorough, but at that time, you may remember . . .” He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Then I walked in on Mr. Bush with my story,” said Don. “Well, I can understand his interest.”

  Mr. Campion, who had been sitting on the arm of a chair, looking at the crimson glow in the decanter, now stirred himself.

  “Forgive me,” he said diffidently, “but by what method does one identify one particular bottle or set of bottles? I don’t doubt that you can do it, sir, but I’d like to know how.”

  “Of course you would.” At last the Bishop had extracted the question he was waiting for. “Now,” he said. “This is the part of the story I always did mean to tell myself. I don’t suppose either of you young men have ever heard of Les Enfants Doux before, have you?”

  They shook their heads and he sighed, put crime behind him, and plunged happily into fairer country.

  “Nearly all the vineyards of Vosne are small, and most of them are good,” he began, lecturing them gently, one hand tucked under the tail of his coat and the other free for delicate emphasis. “Most of them are famous. There are, as you know, the three Romanées and the Richebourg, the La Tache, the lesser known Les Malconsorts, and others less important. But there is one little vineyard, I doubt if it extends to more than three-quarters of an acre, which is different, and in some opinions, in most years superior to them all. Its produce never reaches the market.” He paused for his announcement to have the right effect. Nothing so forceful as a dramatic effect, but one in which just the right element of surprise and interest was as carefully blended as in, say, a very good Highland whisky.

  “This little vineyard of Les Enfants Doux lies just beyond La Tache. It is hidden from the main road by a very gentle dip in the ground,” he went on, his voice as mellow as the grapes of which he spoke. “The land has always belonged to a peasant family called Bigot, and at one time they had the honour of providing the great ladies of the House of Bragelonne with a wet nurse, whenever one was required.” He paused, and smiled faintly. “I cannot tell you, I’m afraid, how this was arranged so felicitously, but that is the story, and on one occasion the twin sons of a certain Comte de Bragelonne were placed as infants in the care of Heloise Bigot, the beautiful young wife of the owner of this little patch of land. About six months after their arrival an epidemic broke out in Burgundy, and the children died. The young nurse was fear-stricken and the mother heart-broken. The great lady, and the great ladies of France in those days were terrifyingly great, left the Court and drove down like a thunder-cloud upon the unfortunate Bigots. Her rage and grief, or perhaps it should have been the other way round, were formidable indeed, but when she came at last upon the woman she found her, so the story goes, dead of remorse (or of course it may have been the fever) lying across the tiny biers of her two charges.

  “The Comtesse, touched by this devotion, for although heart-broken, you understand, she was nowhere near dying herself, suffered a most satisfactory change of heart, and instead of pressing home the punishment she had prepared for the wretched Papa Bigot, she made him what amends she could by providing a sum of money to be spent on planting his field with the Pinot, and undertaking that her family should purchase the entire output of the vineyard for ever.”

  “And they still do?” Don enquired.

  “They still did until the beginning of this war,” said the Bishop. “Heaven alone knows what tragedy may have occurred now, of course. The little place flourished, and the wine which grew there (some say from the very soil where the sweet children and their faithful foster-mother lie buried, but that is unlikely) certainly had a strange, gentle freshness to be found in no other vintage in the world. The Bragelonne family reserved the whole of the growth, about forty-five to fifty dozen a year, I suppose, and a superstition grew up among them decreeing that ill luck would befall the children of the house should the wine ever find its way off the estate.”

  “And yet you had three cases of it,” ventured Mr. Campion.

  “I had six cases once,” said the Bishop of Devizes, “and I’ll break my rule and tell you how I came by it. I never have told this story because it is both sentimental and romantic, and neither of those delightful things is the better for an airing, don’t you know.”

  “If you’d rather not, sir,” began Don hastily, and fumbled for the end of the sentence. “I guess we’ve got pretty positive proof by this time.”

  Mr. Campion knew his uncle well and was fond of him.

  “I think I should like to hear it,” he said.

  “Over-ruled,” murmured the Bishop smiling at Don.

  “Well, many years ago when I was a very young man, just after I came down from Oxford, I spent a holiday at Bragelonne tutoring the heir who was a very delicate and rather stupid boy. He had an elder sister, her name was Elise; she was very beautiful and her birthday fell on the seventeenth of July. Now I would stress that there was no love affair. In those days we were circumspect, and in hopeless situations we may have formed attachments but we never had affairs.”

  He stood looking at them, his bright blue eyes alive with unconquerable youth. “For three years running I visited Bragelonne in the summer,” he went on, “and on the last occasion I was able to congratulate my Elise on her betiothal to her cousin, Henri de Bragelonne, next in succession to her brother. I was present at the wedding and after that, although we never met, I used always to send her some trifle on her birthday and always in return she wrote to thank me and to give me an account of her fortunes. I suppose we corresponded in this way for twenty years. In the last war the little custom came to an abrupt end, but when at last the fighting was done and the German armies retreated I received a letter from a notary telling me Elise was dead. He enclosed a letter from her written very near her end, and also told me that six dozen of Burgundy was being forwarded to me at her order.”

  Mr. Campion gave up doubting, the old man had a very strong case. He was putting it very well, too, addressing himself mainly to Don to whom he had evidently taken a liking.

  “Her letter was charming,” he said, “but h
er news was bad. Her brother had died, her husband was killed almost immediately after succeeding to the estate, and a few months later her son had followed his father. She knew she was very ill and she feared that she would never write to me again, but as she said, she was still feminine and she did not want to be forgotten. Therefore (she was very practical, my dear Elise), she was sending me six dozen of Les Enfants Doux of the great year, and she begged that I would always drink a bottle of it on the seventeenth of July. Not the best time of year, you know, for a royal Burgundy, but how was she to know that, poor dear? Women were not connoisseurs in her day.”

  “You got the whole six dozen intact? That was a bit of a miracle in itself, wasn’t it?” said Don curiously.

  “It was. How she had managed to preserve anything so precious and yet so vulnerable during the whole of the Occupation, I cannot imagine, but she did. And as for the superstition, poor lady, I have no doubt that she felt no further ill luck could befall her family.”

  “It’s very conclusive,” murmured Mr. Campion bringing the matter down to earth.

  “Oh, it is. I’m afraid so.” The Bishop picked up the empty bottle and pointed to a scribble in red ink on the lower right-hand corner of the label. “You see that?” he said. “That’s J.D. They are the initials of the wine steward of the period. I remember him well, he was a great character called Jules Denise. You see, a certain percentage of the yield was put aside, always for the Comte’s own table, as opposed to his chaplain’s or his major-domo’s or any of the other little establishments on the estate, and on each bottle of this little reserve Jules used to put his mark. All my six dozen had that scrawl; you mentioned it to Bush, Lieutenant, and when I heard of it I felt very sure. That is why I took the astonishing liberty of—er—‘gate-crashing’ your party.”

  “1 should think so.” Don was looking at the decanter with respect. “It seems criminal to drink it, this may be the last there is in the world. I don’t think we need let Bush open that second bottle, do you? After all, a magnificent wine like that . . .”

  “Needs no bush,” said the Bishop shyly, laughing at the silly little joke which everybody made sooner or later. “Where is the man? I do hope nothing has happened. I’m afraid I’ve been talking for nearly an hour.”

  No one answered him, but in the silence which followed his remark, someone tapped at the door. It was old Fred, a gleam of anticipation in his watery eyes.

  “Mr. Campion is wanted on the ’phone,” he said. “The gentleman seemed upset, sir.”

  “Who is it?”

  “He didn’t say, sir, but he seemed very shaken. This way, it’s in the passage just along here.”

  When Campion reached the telephone and before he had taken up the receiver he could hear someone shouting at the other end. “Hello. Hello. Hel-lo. Campion. Oh, there you are, are you? I say . . .”

  It was Johnny Carados, sounding as nearly rattled as Campion had ever heard him.

  “Yes?”

  “Can you come round to Theodore Bush’s house as soon as dammit? You know where it is, don’t you? Forty-two Bedbridge Row. Come at once, will you?”

  “I will.”

  “Good man. I need you. I say, Campion . . . ?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve killed the blighter. . . . Good-bye.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE JOURNEY FROM the Minoan to Bedbridge Row in Holborn in a pitch-dark and taxiless London proved to be more of an undertaking than the exile had expected, and it was nearly an hour later when at last he groped his way up the worn stone steps of the narrow Georgian house in the corner of the half-ruined cul-de-sac. During his stumbling journey he had plenty of time for thought, and the closer he came to this new development the less he liked it.

  There were times, too, when he fancied he was being followed, but in these dark empty streets it was difficult to tell. In a crowded city square he could have been sure, but none of his past experience allowed for these vast open spaces wherein one set of footsteps rang out loudly in the silence. He was not alone at any rate. Someone else made that journey as well as himself.

  The house when he reached it might have been empty for years. His small torch beam showed a worn door with dirty iron furnishings and brass numerals green with neglect, but when he pressed the bell-push a sound like a fire alarm echoed in the hall within.

  To his surprise the door opened instantly, and in the darkness a woman seized his arm.

  “Oh, there you are at last,” she said. “Do go up to him, we can’t do anything with him, and he won’t send for the police. Isn’t it awful?”

  Campion recognized Miss Chivers with surprise. He had not expected her. There was a faint blue light in the white-painted hall and her sensible face looked pallid in the gloom. She was still efficient, of course, and still preserved her confidential friendliness of manner, but alarm had intensified each characteristic so that she presented a caricature of herself.

  “Don’t stand there staring at me,” she said. “I dare say you are surprised to see me here, I’m surprised to be here. But when he rang through I thought I’d better come. Gee-gee Gold is up there with Dion Robson, the doctor. Johnny rang me at Carados Square and told me to fetch him. I came along to see if I could do anything, but he won’t speak to me. He’s in the front room on the first floor. The others are all in the bathroom higher up; I’m keeping here to mind the door and to stop the old housekeeper coming up from the basement. My God, they are a lot.”

  “Doesn’t the housekeeper know what’s happened?”

  “Nobody knows except us. It’s madness, of course. They’ll hang Johnny if he doesn’t look out. He’s gone out of his mind, Mr. Campion, the war’s gone to his head.”

  “Is Bush actually dead?”

  “He may be by this time. He wasn’t half an hour ago—not quite. He will die, though, and then there will be an almighty row. For heaven’s sake go upstairs, and get some sense into Johnny and make him send for the police.”

  She gave him a push which all but over-balanced him, and he started off down the passage obediently. At the foot of the stairs he paused, and looked back.

  “Are you all right down here alone?”

  “Me? My dear man, don’t worry about me,” she said, laughing irritably. “I’m only the secretary of the madhouse. It’s the master you’ve got to look after.”

  Mr. Campion mounted the stairs and came into an elegant little hall with a grey carpeted floor. If Theodore Bush did not bother about the outside of his house any more than he did about the outside of his bottles, like them the inside had considerable merit. The glossy door to the large living-room faced the stair head, and all was silent behind it. From further up the stairs the sound of voices and restless movement floated down. Campion tapped on the door and waited.

  “Hello, that you, Dion?” Johnny’s voice was almost casual.

  “No. Campion here.”

  “Well, come in, you ape. I’m not waiting behind the door with a club.”

  Campion entered a large and graceful yet entirely masculine room and looked about him. Carados was partially hidden in an enormous blue leather arm-chair, his legs stretched out to the fire and his big chin resting on his breast. He did not move as the other man came over to him but raised his eyes.

  “This is a stinker,” he said. “What do you know about this, eh?”

  “Almost nothing,” said Campion. “I’m hoping to pick it up as I go along. What have you done to him? Hit him on the head with a bottle?”

  “Oh, no. No, I was much more subtle than that.” The grey-blue eyes rested on Campion’s face with an expression in them which he did not immediately recognize. Only gradually did it occur to him that Carados was afraid. “No, I poisoned the poor old boy,” he said at last. “I did, Campion. I gave him God knows how much chloral hydrate and I saw him mix it in a tooth-glass and knock it back at one go. Dreadful, I shall never forget it. Poor old Theo. He was a bit of a crank, of course. Believed in all the
wrong things and was heaven’s own peculiar prize bore, but to kill him, Campion! To kill him like that, all defenceless, in a neat little tucked shirt and blue pants. No, I’ll never forgive myself, never as long as I live.”

  Campion sat down and crossed his long, thin legs.

  “I hate to be vulgar, but that won’t be long if this is the story you’re telling,” he said affably.

  Carados grunted. “I’ve got the wind up,” he said. “Someone’s being horribly clever. I suspected it when I saw that wretched woman lying dead in your flat. I thought then that someone was going all out for me. Afterwards I wondered if perhaps I was making myself too important in the story, but now I know I was right. Someone is not only trying to get rid of me, but they’re trying to prove I’m ga-ga first. What about you? Are you for me, or against me?”

  “I’d take a drink from you,” said Mr. Campion, considering it was a handsome offer in the circumstances.

  “I wouldn’t.” Carados was bitter. “I wouldn’t touch me or anything I had handled with a barge pole. I’m dangerous.”

  “Well, I don’t know how long it’s necessary to suffer to be interesting,” said Campion with calculated brutality, “but I’ll buy it. What did you think you were giving him?”

  Johnny’s face cleared and he felt in the breast pocket of his tunic. “The expert’s calm is very pleasant when you need it,” he said. “Look. See this?” Campion took what appeared to be a small imitation-leather cigarette case from his outstretched hand. It was buttoned down, envelope fashion, and embossed on the grain in gilt script was the legend: “Zo-zo. Pour l’ennui de l’estomac. Gilbert Frères. Paris. 15ième.”

  Mr. Campion raised the flap cautiously. Inside the case was divided into ten small partitions, each one of which normally contained a phial stoppered by a metal cap and sheathed in typical blue-and-green-striped metal paper. At the moment there were seven left.