Dancers in Mourning Read online

  ‘My dear chap, how should I know? I’ve no experience of the woman.’

  ‘All right, all right, don’t go off the deep end.’ Poyser sounded exasperated. ‘I only thought we ought to make up our minds.’

  Mr Campion walked quietly away. It always happened, he reflected. As soon as a violent death occurred there was always some authoritative soul on hand to come forward with the inevitable ‘plan of campaign’, entirely disregarding the fact that there has arisen the one situation which is still taken seriously by the community at large.

  Love or money can conceal every other disturbing occurrence to be met with in civil life, but sudden death is inviolate. A body is the one thing that cannot be explained away.

  As he walked alone between the yew hedges it occurred to him that in an age when all the deepest emotions can be successfully laughed out of existence by any decently educated person, the sanctity and importance of sudden death was a comforting and salutary thing, a last little rock, as it were, in the shifty sands of one’s own standards and desires.

  He came out of the shelter of the hedge and walked down an incline to the wide stone margin of the water. The little lake was really no more than a large kidney-shaped pond formed by widening the natural bed of a small brook which ran through the grounds. A past owner had planted willows round the stone pavement and the Sutanes had contributed a bathing pavilion.

  He found what he was looking for immediately. On the east bank, in front of the pavilion, there was a wide paved platform about twenty feet square, and upon it stood the small black gramophone, the lid still raised.

  In the daylight the place had an overgrown, partially neglected air which was not unattractive. Sutane was not extraordinarily wealthy and two good men and a boy provided all the labour he could reasonably afford for the grounds. In the moonlight, however, all the old formal glory conceived by the original designers was magically restored and Campion made his way to the gramophone through a world of ordered grandeur as visionary as any other ghost of the past.

  He stood for some little time at the foot of the low step to the platform and looked at the surface closely. It was smooth and dry as tarmac and about as informative.

  Having convinced himself on this point he approached the gramophone and squatted down on his heels beside it. The record had played until the automatic stop had silenced it. Campion read the title, ‘“Etude”, Vowis’, a silly little piece of experimental trivia barely worth recording. If Chloe Pye had danced to that formless bagatelle he took off his hat to her.

  He glanced into the record case and saw that two discs were missing. Looking round for the second, he found it lying on its grey envelope in the patch of shadow cast by the gramophone lid. Its discovery interested him considerably. It was cracked, not in a clean break, but in small pieces, as though a heavy foot had been planted directly upon it. The label was still legible, and he made it out with the aid of his torch. It was Falla’s Love the Magician, Part I. Part 2 was presumably on the other side, therefore, and an idea occurred to him. Using a handkerchief to protect his fingers, he raised the record still on the machine. As he had suspected, the third and final part of the Falla piece was on the underside. He raised his eyebrows. Trivial pieces like the ‘Etude’ were frequently used, he knew, as fill-ups when a serious work did not divide into an even number of records, but if Miss Pye had been dancing to the Falla, which was a reasonable thing to do, he wondered why she had played through the ‘Etude’ at all, and where she had been when the automatic stop had silenced its delicate inanities.

  He sat back on his heels and looked about him for the other things he had come to find. A glance told him that his second quest was not to be so simple as the first had been. Scarlet silk, so evident in sunlight, is apt to melt into a black shadow in the tricksy light of the moon. However, Chloe Pye had been wearing a red silk wrap-round skirt to her ankles last time he had seen her alive, and she had certainly not been wearing it as she lay so tragically mangled on the grass verge in the lane. He wondered when and where she had lost it.

  It was at this point in his investigations, as he sat silent in moonlight so bright that it seemed strange that it should not be warm, that he first noticed that he was not alone in the garden. Something was moving over the dry wiry grass under the oaks behind the pavilion. He thought it was a dog at first, padding backwards and forwards beneath the trees, until a certain rhythmic regularity in the sounds made him change his mind.

  Not wishing to be discovered examining the gramophone, he rose cautiously and stepped on to the clipped turf of the path. The shadow of the pavilion sheltered him and he stood there quietly, staring in front of him.

  Just behind the bathing house there was a natural clearance between the trees. A wide strip of mossy grass which had been allowed to grow wild ran down to the ivy-grown relics of an artificial ruin. This structure had never been an unqualified success, even in its Georgian heydey, and it now remained a record of the failure of an uninspired British workman to reproduce the half-remembered majesty which his employer had seen upon the Grand Tour. The movement came from the shadow below this ruin and between Campion and itself the moonlight lay in patches upon the grass, making the turf look like the spread-out skin of some enormous piebald animal.

  As Campion watched he could hear the steps distinctly, a slow measured rustling in the darkness.

  It occurred to him with something of a shock that it must be two o’clock in the morning at least. The very lateness of the hour seemed to excuse an open investigation and he was just about to walk out of his refuge when a light wind sprang up in the trees, swinging the shadows like clothes on a line.

  Mr Campion stood perfectly still. Among the shadows he had seen a figure. As he stared it emerged into the light. It was a girl and she so startled him that he did not recognise her immediately. She was dressed in a flimsy nightgown with some sort of chiffon coat with floating sleeves over it, and she was dancing.

  Compared with the professional standard of Sutane and Slippers her display was painfully amateur. Her movements were not particularly graceful and were without design. But there was an intensity of feeling, an urge for self-expression, which was primitive and impressive.

  She was intent upon her dance, which appeared to have some half-considered ritual as a motif. Campion watched her running backwards and forwards, bowing and wheeling, her arms now above her head, now shoulder-high. He recognised Eve Sutane and was unaccountably relieved. Out here in the warm night air, her draperies fluttering round her and her body taut with emotion, she was a very different creature from the sullen, dull-eyed girl of the morning.

  He remembered that she was probably about seventeen. In common with all good neo-Georgians he had done his share of reading on the one great study of that barren age and knew a little about the psychology of sex. It occurred to him irrelevantly that whereas a Victorian would have seen in this display either an exhibition of sweet, spiritual sensibility or a girl catching her death of cold, he himself received a confused and uncomfortable impression of sap-risings, undiscovered desires and primitive exhibitionism.

  He was considering which aspect was really the most satisfactory in the long run when the unusual circumstances attending this particular manifestation of youth returned to his mind with a shock. He wondered if she could possibly not have heard of Chloe Pye’s death, and, walking round behind the pavilion, he coughed discreetly.

  She came sweeping past him as he wandered down the path. At first she evidently intended to ignore him, but changed her mind and returned. She looked almost beautiful in her excitement. Her eyes were shining and her mouth, wide and sensitive like her brother’s, twisted into a smile whenever she forgot to control it.

  ‘What are you doing here? I thought you’d gone to the doctor’s?’

  Her manner was gauche to the point of brusqueness.

  Campion eyed her quizzically.

  ‘He was an exhausting old gentleman. I thought I’d cool off before going in
.’

  ‘Have you been down here long?’

  ‘No,’ he lied politely. ‘I’ve just arrived. Why?’

  She laughed and he could not tell if she was merely relieved or really was as exultant as she sounded.

  ‘We don’t like sneaking snoopy people,’ she said. ‘We hate them. Good night.’

  Turning from him, she ran on down the path, happiness in every spring of her body and in the tread of her bare white feet.

  Campion made certain that she had gone into the house before he returned to the clearing. There he found Chloe Pye’s red silk skirt spread out like a prayer-mat. Eve had been dancing upon it.

  6

  ‘CHLOE PYE DIES TRAGICALLY

  ‘BRILLIANT YOUNG DANCER MEETS WITH FATAL MISHAP

  ‘At a little after ten o’clock this evening Miss Chloe Pye, who only last night had made a successful return to the London stage in The Buffer at the Argosy Theatre, fell to her death beneath the wheels of an oncoming motor-car. The accident happened at the country estate of Mr Jimmy Sutane, where she had been spending the week-end. Mr Sutane, who was driving the car when the fatal incident occurred, is prostrated with shock.

  ‘And I don’t see we can say any more than that, do you? It gives it to them in one. Of course it’ll bring them down on us like a cloud of hornets. Still, they’d come anyway.’

  Dick Poyser looked up from the bureau in the living-room and spoke with his fountain-pen hovering. Sock, who was lounging behind him, his hands in his pockets, shrugged his shoulders restlessly.

  ‘You can cross out “The Buffer at the Argosy Theatre”, ’ he said. ‘They won’t print that. Oh, all right, old man, all right. I’ll have it roneo’d and take it round if it’ll please you. Some of ’em may even use it. But we’re not going to get away with this easily, believe me.’

  Poyser threw down his pen, letting the ink splatter over the finished page.

  ‘Who in blazes said we were?’ he demanded, his voice shrill with irritation. ‘When you’ve been in this business as long as I have you’ll know that if you give a journalist a bit of copy all ready to send down the chances are he’ll use it, or at least a bit of it, rather than take the trouble of working the sentences out for himself. You can’t dictate to ’em, but you can sometimes persuade ’em, if they don’t know you’re doing it.

  ‘Besides,’ he added with great seriousness, ‘it’s all a question of time.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ said Sock grimly as he took up the written sheet.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ said Sutane.

  He was sitting in an arm-chair over a fire which Miss Finbrough was coaxing to life. Linda stood forlornly behind his chair and Uncle William sat blinking quietly in a corner, his round pink face a little bluish and his podgy hands folded on his stomach.

  The two men by the bureau gave up their wrangling instantly.

  ‘You go to bed, Jimmy,’ said Poyser. ‘You’ve got to keep fit, old man.’

  Sock looked up, his young face lightened by a wry smile.

  ‘The whole outfit depends on you, James,’ he said regretfully.

  ‘I’ll take him up,’ murmured Miss Finbrough, as though she had been speaking of a child.

  Sutane looked round at them all, a flicker of genuine amusement appearing on his sad, intelligent face.

  ‘What d’you think I am?’ he said. ‘Go away, Finny. I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself. I’m not mental. I may be a dancer of genius, I may make a few thousands a year, I may have just killed Chloe Pye, poor girl, but I’m not a goddamned kid. Oh, hullo, Campion, how did you get on with the doctor?’

  It was astonishing how his pleasant nervous voice could take on such authority. They were all quiet as Campion came in.

  The thin young man smiled at them faintly and gave a guarded account of his visit.

  ‘He’s not an unattractive old boy,’ he said finally, trying to sound reassuring. ‘It was the bathing-dress that got him down. Once I’d put it to him that we were all perfectly normal but busy people he began to be much more tractable. He’ll perform an autopsy, of course. I – er – I don’t think he’s quite so set on suicide as he was.’

  ‘Good man,’ said Sutane. ‘Good man. I appreciate that, Campion. Sock told me about the car. That was amusing. I shouldn’t have thought of it on the spur of the moment. You’ll have to stay and see us through, you know.’

  ‘What’s that? What’s that?’

  Poyser was interested and, much to Mr Campion’s embarrassment, his little subterfuge was explained in detail. He stood by, looking at them all uncomfortably while they discussed the mechanics of the move with schoolboyish satisfaction. It occurred to him then what a pack of children they were, all of them. Their enthusiasm, their eagerness to escape from the main shocking reality, their tendency to make everything more bearable by dramatising it; it was the very stuff of youth.

  He glanced at Linda. She alone had reacted to the tragedy in a way he fully understood. As she stood behind Sutane’s chair, her arms hanging limply at her sides and her face pallid, she looked exhausted, ready to sleep on her feet.

  Sock went out into the hall and came back in a disreputable leather coat. He was as brisk as if he had only just risen.

  ‘Well, I’ll get going then,’ he said. ‘I’ll trot round and see everybody I can find. We can’t possibly keep it quiet. We all know that, don’t we? But I’ll put in a delicate word here and there and I’ll come down in the morning and meet the boys when they turn up. You go to bed, Jimmy. Leave it all to us.’

  He went out and Sutane turned in his chair and glanced at his wife.

  ‘Mercer had better put up these two,’ he said. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I left him in the little music-room,’ said Uncle William, coming to life with a jerk. ‘I’ll go and find him.’

  He paddled across the room and came back with the composer. Mercer glanced round gravely.

  ‘I knew I couldn’t do anything,’ he said, ‘so I hung about in there to be out of the way. Was that right? What happened? Police gone away?’

  ‘Yes.’ Dick Poyser closed the bureau. ‘Yes. They’ll be back in the morning. There’ll be an inquest. You’ll have to attend that, Jimmy. Would you like to cut out the show for a day or so? Let Konrad take it.’

  Sutane frowned. ‘What do you think …?’ he began unhappily.

  Linda interrupted. ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning,’ she said. ‘He must sleep. Talk tomorrow.’

  Miss Finbrough sniffed.

  ‘There’s a lot to be said for that,’ she put in so sharply that Campion looked at her. She was resentful, he noticed, and it occurred to him that she did not like any other woman to give a thought to Sutane’s physical well-being, a province which she evidently thought entirely her own.

  ‘Where is Konrad?’ Campion enquired.

  ‘Oh, he went to bed.’ Poyser laughed as he spoke. ‘Konnie has to have his sleep, whoever gets killed. He’s got his rally to think of.’

  Linda turned to Mercer.

  ‘I wondered if you’d put up Uncle William and Mr Campion?’ she said. ‘They didn’t intend to stay, you see, and there isn’t a room ready.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like that.’ Mercer spoke as though the suggestion had been put forward as a measure to spare him any loneliness. ‘We’ll push off fairly soon, shall we? Getting late.’

  ‘Good idea,’ agreed Uncle William. ‘Think better in the morning.’ He took Linda’s hand and held it. ‘A terrible thing, my dear,’ he said. ‘A terrible thing. But we’re here, you know, Campion and I. Do anything we can. You can rely on us. Try to sleep and forget all about it until the morning. Things never seem so bad in the morning. I’ve noticed that all my life.’

  It was not an inspired speech but its intention was unmistakable. Linda smiled at him gratefully.

  ‘You’re a dear,’ she said. ‘Good night.’

  Mercer looked round him.

  ‘I had a coat,’ he began. ‘No, that’s r
ight, I didn’t. I’d better take one out of the cloak-room, hadn’t I, Jimmy? It gets damned cold at this time of night.’

  He went out to pick up the borrowed garment and Poyser giggled. Like many very small men he had a curious rattling laugh with a gurgle in it which is usually associated with childhood.

  ‘What a bloke!’ he murmured. ‘Well, I shall sleep for a couple of hours and go up in the dawn.’

  Uncle William touched Campion’s sleeve.

  ‘Come on, my boy,’ he said. ‘Pick up our host in the hall, don’t you know.’

  The three men did not talk as they strode through the dark garden, but when they crossed the bridge Mercer halted and demanded to be shown the scene of the accident. Campion glanced at him curiously. He made an odd figure in the half-light, his top-heavy shoulders straining the seams of Sutane’s overcoat, while his attitude towards the affair, which was that of a disinterested but privileged spectator, was disconcerting.

  ‘It must have been suicide,’ he pronounced judicially when Campion had given him the bare facts. ‘I shan’t say so, of course, if they don’t want it known, but any fool can see it must have been intentional. An extraordinary thing for a woman to do. Fancy going to a stranger’s house for the weekend and calmly breaking her neck there, making trouble and inconvenience for everyone. Still, I’m not surprised. I thought she was definitely queer in the living-room this morning.’

  He moved on and they followed him willingly. It was chilly in the early dawn and Uncle William’s teeth were chattering, while Mr Campion, for private reasons, had no desire to talk about Chloe Pye’s death.

  Mercer drawled on. His articulation was maddeningly bad and he appeared to be thinking aloud.

  ‘The woman wasn’t even a dancer,’ he said. ‘I saw her once. No talent at all. Poyser told me she was thundering awful on Saturday night. Why did Jimmy put her in the show? Do you know?’

  He did not seem to expect an answer, but went mumbling on until they came through an immense kitchen-garden to his house on the edge of the estate.