[The Girl From UNCLE 04] - The Cornish Pixie Affair - Leslie Peter (электронная книга .txt) 📗

"I shall look forward to seeing it. What paper are you doing it for?"

"A syndicate. Features people. I don't expect you've heard of them."

"Where do you hope to sell, then?"

"Oh," Mark said carelessly, "the glossies. You know."

Soon afterwards, Wright made his excuses and left and Slate was alone with the policeman.

"It must be nice always being in the swim — or even one jump ahead of fashion," Curnow said wistfully. "In a little place like this, it's only when some accident like this affair of the girl pushes us into the headlines that we realise how far behind the times we really are."

"Oh, I don't know. You've got permanence down here. And character. And much, much less of that terrible strain all the time that we have up there. That's one of the main points I shall make in my piece."

"If you don't mind my saying so," the superintendent observed suddenly, "that's a very splendid suit you have there. Really with-it, that is."

Mark smiled. "Think so?" he said. "It's from Carnaby Street, actually!"

"Ah, yes... Carnaby Street. We've read about that. I've even been there — but it's no good going to London or places like that as a tourist. You only feel more of a country bumpkin than ever. You have to belong..." The superintendent's voice tailed off dolefully.

"Look here," Mark said abruptly. "Have you lunched? No? Then why don't you have lunch here with me? Be my guest — and I can tell you one or two things about London that might change your metropolitan-slanted mind!"

Once they were settled upstairs in the panelled dining room with its ship's chronometer and its portholes and its nets on the wall, he set himself out to win the policeman's confidence, talking gaily and amusingly of life in a dozen of the world's capitals. It was not until they were sipping their brandy that he returned to the subject of the girl who had been murdered in the circus above the town. "I'd love to know the way you set about a murder enquiry," he said. "I mean, really know what you actually think, when it's all starting."

Curnow's blue eyes twinkled shrewdly below his tangled brows. "You may not be a newsman now, Mr. Slate," he said, "but I guess old habits die hard, eh? Once a reporter, always a reporter!"

"Just call it simple curiosity," Slate grinned. "But I promise that nothing you tell me will in any sense be used for a newspaper piece. I can — er — safely say that I have no intention whatever of writing anything at all about the unfortunate young woman." He paused, smiled a small, private smile, and then swallowed the last of his coffee.

The policeman stared at him for a moment, and then went on: "After all, why not? It's supposed to help us clarify our ideas if we have a Watson — at least it does in the books…"

"I'm all ears," Slate said. "Let me get you another brandy first, though." He crossed to the bar, returned with the two glasses and signalled the waiter to bring them more coffee.

"This seems like a simple — in fact, rather a sordid — case of murder," the superintendent resumed when the man had poured and gone. "Gay girl works for a circus. Gay girl settles down when she meets poor but honest boyfriend also working at the circus. A marriage is arranged. Settled-down girl goes gay again when she meets rich sophisticate. Big trouble with honest B, who is madly jealous."

"Jealous enough to kill?"

"Possibly. That's what we have to discover. At any rate, gay girl ends up done in — either by her young friend out of jealousy, or by her older friend because she was becoming a nuisance and he was afraid his wife might find out."

"Oh, he's married then?"

"Aren't they always?"

"Yes, I suppose they are. You said the girl and her boyfriend both worked at the circus, didn't you?"

"I did. The boy's father owns the concern; his mother does the palmistry bit; a sister is the equestrienne; one brother acts as ringmaster and another has a candid-camera seaside snapshot concession."

"Practically a family business, then?"

"Practically. There are a few hired hands — but the old man's tough about the money. They have to pay for their concessions, family or not. Most of these small travelling circuses are like that. Down here in the southwest, we're one of the few areas still rural enough to support them. You have to have a region where they'll go out to be entertained, where the box isn't in every village parlour... Where was I? — Oh, yes: the boyfriend himself. He's a nice enough lad, always seemed a bit of a tearaway, though. Villainous temper, too. He acts as general dogsbody around the circus in summer; takes the money and that. But in the winter he spends most of his time at his wheel, turning souvenirs for the girl to sell."

"What kind of souvenirs?" Slate asked.

"Oh... ashtrays, lighthouses, trinket boxes, Cornish pixies. You know."

"And the girl sold them?"

"Yes, she had a concession from the old man to run a little kiosk. Most of the boy's output was unloaded there — though some of the stuff's given away as prizes at the other sideshows. Most of it's Serpentine. Know what that is?"

"It's a hydrated silicate of magnesium, isn't it? Occurring in this part of the country probably as a rock vein formed by the metamorphosis of Dolomites or igneous extrusions rich in magnesium," Slate returned glibly.

Superintendent Curnow burst out laughing. "There was a saying when I was a lad," he exclaimed, "that you mustn't teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Sorry I underestimated your general knowledge! As far as I'm concerned, Serpentine is simply that mottled red and green stone that can be cut and turned and polished up a treat!"

"The girl," Slate pursued. "Was it her own booth where she was found dead?"

"Bless you, no. A sideshow operated by one of the hired help. He puts on a clown's rig and the local corner-boys let off steam by pelting him with balls of cotton wool. Gets rid of all their aggression, too!"

"And someone else had got rid of their aggression on the lady, in the same booth?"

"Yes. Not with cotton wool missiles, though. There were three of those hard wooden balls from the coconut-shy beneath the body."

"Wooden and not woollen... Good Lord! You don't mean that she was killed... that somebody held her up and... and chucked... But that's horrible!"

"Murder's a horrible business, Mr. Slate, at the best of times. But that is what somebody wanted us to believe," Curnow said soberly.

"Wanted you to believe?"

The policeman nodded. "Metcalf, the police surgeon, has established that the cause of death was a severe blow on the head — it could have been any one of several he found on the frontal region and cranium," he said.

"And...?"

"The only thing is, there are four of these whacking great contusions, any one of which might have caused death — but only three balls."

Slate whistled quietly. "so maybe she was killed by the traditional blunt instrument — and the balls were thrown afterwards?"

"That's one possibility. Another is that the murderer hurled three balls, found that they hadn't done their job properly, and finished her off with your blunt instrument. A third is that he picked up one of the balls and threw it a second time... which seems to me unlikely, since there's a great pile of them at the coconut-shy, and it would have been quicker to have taken another of those than to have gone up to the kiosk and retrieved one of the original three. The pathologist's report — when we get it — should help sort that one out."