Off with His Head Read online

  ‘I’m sure I do ax your pardon, ma’am,’ Trixie said. ‘Axcuse me, please.’ She crossed the room to the wash-stand, set down her can of water, returned past Mrs Bünz and went out again. She shut the door gently behind her and descended to the back parlour, where Alleyn, Fox, Thompson and Bailey had finished their breakfasts and were setting their course for the day.

  ‘Axcuse me, sir,’ Trixie said composedly.

  ‘All right, Trixie. Any news for us?’

  ‘So there is, then.’ She crossed her plump arms and laid three fingers of each hand on the opposite shoulder. ‘So broad’s that,’ she said, ‘and proper masterpieces for colour: blue and red and yaller and all puffed up angrily-like, either side.’

  ‘You’re a clever girl. Thank you very much.’

  ‘Have you in the force yet, Miss Plowman,’ Fox said, beaming at her.

  Trixie gave them a tidy smile, cleared the breakfast things away, asked if that would be all and left the room.

  ‘Pity,’ Thompson said to Bailey. ‘There isn’t the time.’

  Bailey, who was a married man, grinned sourly.

  ‘Have we got through to everybody, Fox?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘Yes, Mr Alleyn. All set for four o’clock at the castle. The weather report’s still favourable, the telephone’s working again, and Dr Curtis has rung up to say he hopes to get to us by this evening.’

  ‘Good. Before we go any further, I think we’d better have a look at the general set-up. It’ll take a bit of time but I’ll be glad of a chance to try and get some sort of shape out of it.’

  ‘It’d be a nice change to come up against something unexpected, Mr Alleyn,’ Thompson grumbled. ‘We haven’t struck a thing so far.’

  ‘We’ll see if we can surprise you. Come on.’

  Alleyn put his file on the table, walked over to the fireplace and began to fill his pipe. Fox polished his spectacles. Bailey and Thompson drew chairs up and produced their notebooks. They had the air of men who had worked together for a long time and who understood each other’s ways.

  ‘You know,’ Alleyn said, ‘if this case had turned up three hundred years ago, nobody would have had any difficulty in solving it. It’d have been regarded by the villagers, at any rate, as an open-and-shut affair.’

  ‘Would it, now?’ Fox said placidly. ‘How?’

  ‘Magic.’

  ‘Hell!’ Bailey said, and looked faintly disgusted.

  ‘Ask yourselves. Look how the general case echoes the pattern of the performance. Old Man. Five Sons. Money. A will. Decapitation. The only thing that doesn’t tally is the poor old boy’s failure to come to life again.’

  ‘You reckon, do you, sir,’ Thompson asked, ‘that, in the olden days, they’d have taken a superstitious view of the death?’

  ‘I do. The initiates would have thought that the god was dissatisfied or that the gimmick had misfired, or that Ernie’s offering of the goose had roused the bloodlust of the stone or that the rites had been profaned and the Guiser punished for sacrilege. Which again tallies, by the way.’

  ‘Does it?’ Bailey asked, and added: ‘Oh, yes. What you said, Mr Alleyn. That’s right.’

  ‘The authorities, on the other hand,’ Alleyn went on, ‘would have plumped at once for witchcraft and the whole infamous machinery of seventeenth century investigation would have begun to tick over.’

  ‘Do you reckon,’ Thompson said, ‘that any of these chaps take the superstitious view? Seems hardly credible but—well?’

  ‘Ernie?’ Fox suggested rather wearily.

  ‘He’s dopey enough, isn’t he, Mr Fox?’

  ‘He’s not so dopey,’ Alleyn said strongly, ‘that he can’t plan an extremely cunning leg-pull on his old man, his four brothers, Simon Begg, Dr Otterly and Ralph Stayne. And jolly nearly bring it off, what’s more.’

  ‘Hal-lo,’ Bailey said under his breath to Thompson. ‘Here comes the “R. A.” touch.’

  Fox, who overheard him, bestowed a pontifical but not altogether disapproving glance upon him. Bailey, aware of it, said: ‘Is this going to be one of your little surprises, Mr Alleyn?’

  Alleyn said: ‘Damn’ civil of you to play up. Yes, it is, for what it’s worth. Bring out that chit the Guiser’s supposed to have left on his door, saying he wouldn’t be able to perform.’

  Bailey produced it, secured between two sheets of glass and clearly showing a mass of finger-prints where he had brought them up.

  ‘The old chap’s prints,’ he said, ‘and Ernie’s. I got their dabs after you left yesterday afternoon. Nobody objected, although I don’t think Chris Andersen liked it much. He’s tougher than his brothers. There’s a left and right thumb of Ernie’s on each side of the tack hole. And all the rest of the gang, which is what you’d expect, isn’t it, if they handed it round?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘And do you remember where Ernie said he found it?’

  ‘Tacked to the door. There’s the tack-hole.’

  ‘And where are the Guiser’s characteristic prints? Suppose he pushed the paper over the head of the existing tack which the nature of the hole seems to suggest? You’d get a right and left thumb print on each side of the hole, wouldn’t you? And what do you get? A right and left thumb print, sure enough. But whose?’

  Bailey said: ‘Ah hell! Ernie’s.’

  ‘Yes, Ernie’s. So Ernie shoved it over the tack. But Ernie says he found it there when he came down to get the Guiser. So what’s Ernie up to?’

  ‘Rigging the old man’s indisposition?’ Fox said.

  ‘I think so.’

  Fox raised his eyebrows and read the Guiser’s message aloud.

  ‘“Can’t mannage it young Ern will have to. W. A.”’

  ‘It’s the old man’s writing, isn’t it, Mr Alleyn?’ Thompson said. ‘Wasn’t that checked?’

  ‘It’s his writing all right, but, in my opinion, it wasn’t intended for his fellow-mummers, it wasn’t originally tacked to the door, it does-n’t refer to the Guiser’s inability to perform and it doesn’t mean young Ern will have to go on in his place.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Speaking for self,’ Fox said, ‘I am willing to buy it, Mr Alleyn.’ He raised his hand. ‘Wait a bit, though,’ he said. ‘Wait a bit! I’ve started.’

  ‘Away you go.’

  ‘The gardener’s boy went down on Tuesday afternoon with a note for the Guiser telling him he’d got to sharpen that slasher himself and return it by bearer. The Guiser was in Biddlefast. Ernie took the note. Next morning, wasn’t it?—the boy comes for the slasher. It isn’t ready and he’s told by Ernie that it’ll be brought up later. Any good?’

  ‘You’re away to a pretty start.’

  ‘All right, all right. So Ernie does sharpen the slasher and, on the Wednesday, he does take it up to the castle. Now Ernie didn’t give the boy a note from the Guiser, but that doesn’t mean the Guiser didn’t write one. How’s that?’

  ‘You’re thundering up the straight.’

  ‘It means Ernie kept it and pushed it over that tack and pulled it off again and, when he was sent down to fetch his dad, he didn’t go near him. He dressed himself up in the Guiser’s rig while the old boy was snoozing on his bed and he lit off for the castle and showed the other chaps this ruddy note. Now then!’

  ‘You’ve breasted the tape, Brer Fox, and the trophy is yours.’

  IV

  ‘Not,’ Alleyn said dubiously, observing his colleagues, ‘that it gets us all that much farther on. It gets us a length or two nearer but that’s all.’

  ‘What does it do for us?’ Fox ruminated.

  ‘It throws a light on Ernie’s frame of mind before the show. He’s told us himself he went hurtling up the hill in their station wagon dressed in the Guiser’s mummery and feeling wonderful. His dearest ambition was about to be raised: he was to act the leading rôle: literally to “Play the Fool”, in the Dance of the Sons. He was exalted. Ernie’s not the village idiot: he’s an epileptic with all the c
haracteristics involved.’

  ‘Exaggerated moods, sort of?’

  ‘That’s it. He gets up there and hands over the note to his brothers. The understudy’s bundled into Ernie’s clothes, the note is sent in to Otterly. It’s all going Ernie’s way like a charm. The zeal of the folk dance sizzles in his nervous ganglions or wherever fanaticism does sizzle. I wouldn’t mind betting he remembered his sacrifice of our last night’s dinner upon the Mardian Stone and decided it had brought him luck. Or something.’

  Alleyn stopped short and then said in a changed voice: ‘ “It will have blood, they say. Blood will have blood.” I bet Ernie subscribes to that unattractive theory.’

  ‘Bringing him in pretty close to the mark, aren’t you, Mr Alleyn?’

  ‘Well, of course, he’s close to the mark, Brer Fox. He’s as hot as hell, is Ernie. Take a look at him. All dressed up and somewhere to go with his audience waiting for him. Dr Otterly, tuning his fiddle. Torches blazing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Stratford-upon-Avon with all the great ones in waiting behind the curtain or the Little Puddleton Mummers quaking in their borrowed buskins; no, by heaven, nor the Andersen brothers listening for the squeal of a fiddle in the snow: there’s the same kind of nervous excitement let loose. And, when you get a chap like Ernie—well, look at him. At the zero hour, when expectation is ready to topple over into performance, who turns up?’

  The Guiser.’

  ‘The Guiser. Like a revengeful god. Driven up the hill by Mrs Bünz. The Old Man himself, in what the Boys would call a proper masterpiece of a rage. Out he gets, without a word to his driver, and wades in. He didn’t say much. If there was any mention of the hanky-panky with the written message, it didn’t lead to any explanation. He seems merely to have launched himself at Ernie, practically lugged the clothes off him, forced him to change back to his own gear and herded them on for the performance. All right. And how did Ernie feel? Ernie, whose pet dog the old man had put down, Ernie who’d manoeuvred himself into the major role in this bit of prehistoric pantomime, Ernie who was on top of the world? How did he feel?’

  ‘Murderous?’ Thompson offered.

  ‘I think so. Murderous.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fox and Bailey and Thompson. ‘Yes. Well. What?’

  ‘He goes on for their show, doesn’t he, with the ritual sword that he’s sharpened until half-way down it’s like a razor: the sword that cut the Guiser’s hand in a row they had at their last practice, which was first blood to Ernie, by the way. On he goes and takes it out on the thistles. He slashes their heads off with great sweeps of his sword: Ernie is a thistle whiffler and he whiffles thistles with a thistle whiffler. Diction exercise for Camilla Campion. He prances about and plays the savage. After that he gets warmed up still more effectively by dancing and going through the pantomime of cutting the Fool’s head off. And remember he’s in a white hot rage with the Fool. What happens next to Ernie? Nothing that’s calculated to soothe his nerves or sweeten his mood. When the fun is at its height and he’s looking on with his sword dangling by its red cord from his hand, young Stayne comes creeping up behind and collars it. Ernie loses his temper and gives chase. Stayne hides in view of the audience and Ernie plunges out at the back. He’s dithering with rage. Simon Begg says he was incoherent. Stayne, having done the damage, comes out and gives him back the whiffler. Stayne re-enters by another archway. Ernie comes back complete with sword and takes part in the final dance. If you consider Ernie like that, in continuity, divorced for the moment from the trimmings, you get a picture of mounting fury, don’t you? The dog, the Guiser’s cut hand, the decapitated goose, the failure of the great plan, the Guiser’s rage, the stolen sword. A sort of crescendo.’

  ‘Ending,’ Fox mused, ‘in what?’

  ‘Ending, in my opinion, with his performing in deadly reality, the climax of their play.’

  ‘Hey?’ Bailey ejaculated.

  ‘Ending in him taking his Old Man’s head off.’

  ‘Ernie?’

  ‘Ernie.’

  ‘Then—well, cripes,’ Thompson said, ‘so Ernie’s our chap, after all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look—Mr Alleyn—’

  ‘He’s not our chap, because when he took his Old Man’s head off, his Old Man was already dead.’

  V

  Mr Fox, as was his custom, glanced complacently at his subordinates.

  He had the air of drawing their attention to their chief’s virtuosity.

  ‘Not enough blood,’ he explained. ‘On anybody.’

  ‘Yes, but if it was done from the rear,’ Bailey objected.

  ‘Which it wasn’t.’

  ‘The character of the wound gives us that,’ Alleyn said.

  ‘Otterly agrees and I’m sure Curtis will. It was done from the front. You’ll see when you look. Of course, the PM will tell us definitely. If decapitation was the cause of death, I imagine there would be a considerable amount of internal bleaching. I feel certain, though, that Curtis will find there is none.’

  ‘Any other reasons, Mr Alleyn? Apart from nobody being bloody enough?’ Thompson asked.

  ‘If it had happened where he was lying and he’d been alive, there’d have been much more blood on the ground.’

  Bailey suddenly said: ‘Hey!’

  Mr Fox frowned at him.

  ‘What’s wrong, Bailey?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘Look, sir, are you telling us it’s not homicide at all? That the old chap died of heart failure or something and Ernie had the fancy to do what he did? After? Or what?’

  ‘I think that may be the defence that will be raised. I don’t think it’s the truth.’

  ‘You think he was murdered?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pardon me,’ Thompson said politely, ‘but any idea how?’

  ‘An idea, but it’s only a guess. The post-mortem will settle it.’

  ‘Laid out cold somehow and then beheaded,’ Bailey said, and added most uncharacteristically, ‘Fancy.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been the Whiffler,’ Thompson sighed. ‘Not that it seems to matter.’

  ‘It wasn’t the Whiffler,’ Alleyn said, ‘It was the slasher.’

  ‘Oh! But he was dead?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Oh.’

  CHAPTER 11

  Question of Temperament

  Camilla sat behind her window. When Ralph Stayne came into the inn-yard, he stood there with his hands in his pockets and looked up at her. The sky had cleared and the sun shone quite brightly, making a dazzle on the window-pane. She seemed to be reading.

  He scooped up a handful of fast-melting snow and threw it at the glass. It splayed out in a wet star. Camilla peered down through it and then pushed open the window.

  ‘Romeo, Romeo,’ she said, ‘wherefore art thou Romeo?’

  ‘I can’t remember any of it to quote,’ Ralph rejoined. ‘Come for a walk, Camilla. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘OK. Wait a bit.’

  He waited. Bailey and Thompson came out of the side door of the pub, gave him good morning and walked down the brick path in the direction of the barn. Trixie appeared and shook a duster. When she saw Ralph she smiled and dimpled at him. He pulled selfconsciously at the peak of his cap. She jerked her head at him. ‘Come on over, Mr Ralph,’ she said.

  He walked across the yard to her, not very readily.

  ‘Cheer up, then,’ Trixie said. ‘Doan’t look at me as if I was going to bite you. There’s no bones broke, Mr Ralph. I’ll never say a word to her, you may depend, if you ax me not. My advice, though, is to tell the maid yourself and then there’s nothing hid betwixt you.’

  ‘She’s only eighteen,’ Ralph muttered.

  ‘That don’t mean she’s silly, however. Thanks to Ernie and his dad, everybody hereabouts knows us had our bit of fun. The detective gentleman axed me about it and I told him yes.’

  ‘Good God, Trixie!’

  ‘Better the truth from me than a great blowed-up fairy tale from elsewhe
re and likewise better for Camilla if she gets the truth from you. Here she comes.’

  Trixie gave a definite flap with her duster and returned indoors. Ralph heard her greet Camilla, who now appeared with the freshness of the morning in her cheeks and eyes and a scarlet cap on her head.

  Alleyn, coming out to fetch the car, saw them walk off down the lane together.

  ‘And I fancy,’ he muttered, ‘he’s made up his mind to tell her about his one wild oat.’

  ‘Camilla,’ Ralph said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve been going to tell you before and then—well, I suppose I’ve funked it. I don’t know what you feel about this sort of thing and—I—well—I—’

  ‘You’re not going to say you’ve suddenly found it’s all been a mistake and you’re not in love with me after all?’

  ‘Of course I’m not, Camilla. What a preposterous notion to get into your head. I love you more every minute of the day: I adore you, Camilla.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it, darling. Go ahead with your story.’

  ‘It may rock you a bit.’

  ‘Nothing can rock me really badly unless—you’re not secretly married, I hope!’ Camilla suddenly ejaculated.

  ‘Indeed I’m not. The things you think of!’

  ‘And of course (forgive me for mentioning it) you didn’t murder my grandfather, did you?’

  ‘Camilla!’

  ‘Well, I know you didn’t.’

  ‘If you’d just let me—’

  ‘Darling Ralph, you can see by this time that I’ve given in about not meeting you. You can see I’ve come over to your opinion: my objections were immoderate.’

  ‘Thank God, darling. But—’

  ‘All the same, darling, darling Ralph, you must understand that although I go to sleep thinking of you, and wake in a kind of pink paradise because of you, I am still determined to keep my head. People may say,’ Camilla went on, waving a knitted paw, ‘that class is vieux jeu but they’re only people who haven’t visited South Mardian. So what I propose—’