Death of Anton Read online

  Joe Carey, at any rate, sleeps in his caravan, which is a noble affair and fitted with all the very latest contraptions, including a well-stocked liquor cabinet; and certain unkind persons have been known to suggest that the real reason why Mr. Carey prefers living in a caravan to living in an hotel is that it gives him more scope for his amorous adventures. Which, taking a quick look at Mr. Carey’s beery face, bald pate, and overhanging stomach, seems a little surprising.

  The light is switched on in Joe Carey’s super-caravan, at any rate, just as the lights are switched on in a number of rooms in various hotels in the town as the Town Hall clock strikes a quarter to twelve. Herr Ludwig Kranz is in his room in the Station Hotel, sitting on the edge of his bed and drinking hot malted milk…thereby proving that there is, after all, some truth in his unsolicited testimonials which appear so often in the advertisements of the stuff: “The training of wild animals, and of tigers in particular, is a task which requires absolute physical fitness and the steadiest of nerves. I have found that, since taking a nightly tumblerful of…” He has unpacked, and pinned a number of photographs of himself, surrounded by tigers, round the walls, as well as a picture of a young Hungarian girl whom he hopes to marry when he is running a circus of his own.

  Further along the corridor of the same hotel, the immaculate little man who is appearing tomorrow night in a grotesque make-up as Dodo the clown, is lying on top of his bed and turning over the pages of his Seven Pillars of Widsom. Not reading, merely turning the pages. Mr. Mayhew (for that is his name in real life) has been looking for a suitable place to begin reading the book ever since he bought it, but up to now has failed to find one. He has enjoyed looking at the pictures, however, and it gives him a definite superiority complex to be seen carrying the volume about.

  In the King’s Head, Lars Peterson, owner of a sea-lion a great deal more intelligent than himself, has taken a bottle of whisky up to his bedroom and is undressing and drinking in turns. In Mrs. Wilkinson’s High-Class Boarding-House (Terms Moderate, Accounts Weekly) a little group is eating cold meat and pickles and talking loudly of the days when they were at the top of the bill. Or as near the top as makes no matter.

  Midnight.…

  The second of the two special trains which carry Joseph Carey’s World-Famous Circus and Menagerie up and down the country steams into the station, and this time there is no doubt that its occupants have something to do with a circus. The trucks are oddly assorted and of various sizes, and out of them comes a great deal of stamping and shuffling and scraping and growling and roaring. They are all shunted into a siding and left there until five o’clock in the morning, to the annoyance of everyone living near the station and trying to get to sleep. Quite a few of these unfortunate citizens, in fact, make up their minds shortly after midnight to write a fairly snorty letter to the local papers about this unholy row; one female goes so far as to sit up suddenly in bed and demand that her husband does something about it at once. Though, as the husband meekly points out, it is difficult to see what can be done about five elephants, seven tigers, twelve lions, fifty or more horses, and a great collection of other animals, if they have set their minds on yowling and stamping and roaring all night in the siding.

  The biggest noise of all comes from the long wagon near the end of the train, where Anton’s Seven Bengal Tigers have made up their minds to spend the night by pacing up and down, backwards and forwards, from one corner of the truck to the other, reaching out their smooth, well-kept necks and shattering the night with one roar after another. Peculiar behaviour for the tigers; the attendants who have been left on guard over the wagons cannot make it out, for usually Anton’s seven tigers are so bored with night travel that it takes a great deal of persuasion and bad language to wake them up and get them to leave the train. Peter, the oldest and biggest of the seven, has certainly a sore paw which was giving him trouble at the last stop of the circus, but Peter’s sore paw could not be responsible for making all seven beasts create such an unearthly din, and keep it up all night.

  Perhaps—who knows—the seven Bengal tigers are wiser than most of us, and have an inkling of the tragedy that is coming to their cage so very soon.

  Chapter Two

  One of the most recurrent posters advertising the various attractions of Carey’s Circus was the one which depicted a young man and woman, showing a complete disregard for the laws of gravity both in what they were doing and in what they were wearing, hurtling through the air with (apparently) no hope of touching terra firma without breaking every bone in their bodies.

  The young man, shown in the top right-hand corner of the poster doing a triple backwards somersault some two hundred feet in the air, was Lorimer, otherwise Mr. Lorimer Gregson. The lady in the bottom left-hand corner, sailing through the air with arms outstretched in the seemingly vain hope of connecting with her partner in mid-air, was Loretta, otherwise Mrs. Lorimer Gregson. A charming and talented couple, aged twenty-seven and twenty-six respectively. They had been doing this sort of thing since childhood, and had brought down the roofs of several music-halls as the Child Trapeze Wonders when neither of them had reached the age of ten. They had been married under the roof of the big tent of Mendl’s Circus four years ago; they had joined Carey’s the season before last and were now equal leading attraction with Anton and his tigers. And they were paid, grudgingly, eighty pounds a week for risking their young lives twice daily and laughing at the idea of using a net in their act.

  Caught unawares in the seclusion of their bedroom in the Station Hotel, Lorimer and Loretta were not quite as exciting a couple as their posters made out. Loretta, to be perfectly frank, was covering her face with a clammy coating of some beauty preparation, and Lorimer was thoughtfully engaged in bursting a pimple on the point of his chin. These two occupations took up the whole of Mr. and Mrs. Gregson’s attention: not a word was spoken until the pimple was successfully burst and the face cream smeared thoroughly on, and then just as thoroughly removed with a towel. Then Lorimer, having sent up a mute prayer to heaven expressing the hope that the blessed thing wasn’t going to bleed all night, broke the silence.

  “I’m not exactly a fool, you know,” he said.

  “No? Well, as long as you say so, dear…”

  “I’ve been watching you for the last month or so.”

  “Yes. I’ve noticed that all right. Proper little sleuth, aren’t you? Perhaps if you stopped carrying on like Sexton Blake and paid a little more attention to the act, you’d do your stuff a bit better. You’re getting later with that back somersault drop every night.”

  “That’s meant,” said Lorimer. “The later it’s done, the better it looks to the audience.”

  “Really? That’s fine. I suppose one of these nights you’ll leave me dangling in mid-air for a quarter of an hour—just to give the audience its half-crown’s worth, eh?”

  “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about you and Joe.”

  Mrs. Gregson sat up in bed and opened her eyes very wide.

  “Well! Now this is going to be really interesting! If there’s one thing I love, it’s a nice fairy story before I go off to sleep. Tell me all, darling. What about me and Joe?”

  “Well, I’m not exactly a fool—”

  “No, dear. You said that before, didn’t you? We’ve only your word for it, but we’ll take it as agreed. You’re not exactly a fool. So what?”

  “Well, I’ve seen the way you and Carey are playing about.”

  “Yes?”

  “The whole outfit’s talking about the pair of you. The way you went on with him in the train…I’m just warning you, Loretta, that’s all. I know the kind of man he is, and I know you’ve got to be nice with him. But don’t let it go any further than being nice, for God’s sake.”

  “Lorrie—take your clothes off and get into bed.”

  “I’ve seen Carey break up more than one act before now. Women are hi
s profession—the circus is just a side-line.”

  “Oh, shut up…turn off the light and get into bed. I’m dead.”

  “You…you aren’t gone on him, are you?”

  Loretta sat up again and became vehement.

  “Sure. I’m mad about the man. He’s my dream idol. So handsome, so strong…whenever I feel those manly arms around me, crushing my poor weak little body, drawing me closer and closer towards him—hi!…Lorrie…”

  But the other half of the World’s Most Sensational Trapeze Artists had gone out and rudely banged the door in the middle of his wife’s rather lovely sentence.

  “Oh, well…” said his wife, and went off to sleep.

  On the other side of the door, Lorimer stood still for a moment and then decided wisely on a little fresh air. He had taken off his collar and tie, but the night was stifling and it was almost one o’clock; there would be no one about. He walked along the corridor and, turning the corner, bumped into Dodo the clown as he came out of his room.

  “Hullo—not in bed yet?”

  The immaculate little man looked worried.

  “Er—no. I’ve been sitting up, reading. Can’t get to sleep. I was just going down to try and get a tonic water. I—I’ve rung the bell, but no one seems to be up.”

  “That’s not surprising. Cheerio.”

  Lorimer let himself out of the hotel and stepped out into the empty streets. He looked back up to the third fourth-floor window of the room which he and Loretta occupied. The light went out just as he turned his head. He walked on, hands in pockets.

  Maybe he was all wrong about Loretta and Carey…maybe it was just Loretta fooling about, like she always did. But Carey was a nasty piece of work, all the same…you couldn’t trust a man like that with a woman, let alone with a good-looker like Loretta. She knew how to look after herself, though; she wasn’t the same as the other women in the circus, who were ready to leap at anything in trousers.

  Lorimer rather prided himself on the fact that Loretta and he were a class above the other circus artists—all except Dodo, and possibly Anton. They weren’t high-class, but they were decent middle-class; they might have come out of poor families, and had to work like slaves ever since they were kids, but they’d done their best to improve themselves. He used to get ragged unmercifully for going to night-school classes when they were with Mendl’s. Old Mendl had been pretty decent about it, fixing in their act early in the first performance and late in the second so that he could get away…but the rest of the crowd thought he was cuckoo. Mendl understood, though; so did Loretta.

  And it had been worth it: they were top of the bill now, and though Lorimer found it a little difficult to explain how night-schools and studying had helped to get them there, they had all right. They’d taught him one thing…refinement. That was what people were after nowadays; they didn’t like things being thrown at them to the accompaniment of a blare of trumpets, like they used to. They liked cleverness in an act, quietness and subtlety. If you did a daring bit of trapeze work while the tympani crashed and the drums rolled they clapped all right; but if you did the same act, quietly and as though it were of no importance at all, they clapped a damn’ sight harder. There was a little piece of business in their present act which illustrated this very well: while Loretta was swinging towards him, stretching out her arms to be caught in mid-air, Lorimer sat on the higher of the two trapezes which they used, putting straight the beret he wore in his act and apparently paying no attention to his partner’s actions. At the very last moment he dropped and gripped her wrists, as though it had suddenly occurred to him to do something about it.…That always went down well.

  Yes, it had been worth it. He was able to talk to people—not just about the circus, which was all that the other circus folk could talk about—but about anything, taking his part in a normal conversation. He wasn’t in the same class as Dodo, who spent all his free time reading thick books and bringing out quotations from Plato and all those guys. Maybe not even in the same class as Anton, who had come from a good family and had been to a public school and a respectable business before he went nuts and joined up in a fifth-rate travelling show. Hardly in the same class as Anton, who could take more than his share in any conversation, though Lorimer suspected a good deal of it to be bluff…But, all the same, he was a class above the rest of them. Thank God for that.

  Loretta and Carey, though. He wasn’t sure of Loretta. He never had been sure. Sometimes he thought she was of the same type as himself, anxious to get on, keen on the right things. At other times, she went on like any other circus woman. She had a common streak in her which kept on bobbing up every now and then. Maybe he was all wrong about her and Carey, of course. But if he were right?…

  He remembered Raquel, who had been Vincent Varconi’s partner in the high-wire act in Carey’s last season. She had started with Joe Carey in just the same way as Loretta was doing now. Nothing serious; seeing a lot of each other, getting people talking about them and nudging each other and hinting things, though. Then there’d been the flare-up. Varconi had caught her in Carey’s caravan, preparing to sleep with him. That had been a hell of a night, all right. Varconi was Italian; he’d wanted to get the thing settled right away…with a knife. Carey had knocked him out with a left to the chin which took the wind out of everyone’s sails, particularly Varconi’s. He’d booted the pair of them out of the circus first thing next morning—said he had no use for a husband who used a knife, and less use for a wife who was foolish enough to own a husband like that. They’d gone—separately, of course. Raquel was selling chocolates and cigarettes in a dirty little dance-hall somewhere in London now; Varconi was dragging along, doing high-wire stuff on his own in three-night stances with touring shows. Two lives smashed in one night. That mustn’t ever happen to Loretta and himself…but it might.

  He stopped and asked the one policeman still out of bed where Martin’s Field was.

  “Martin’s Field? What do you want to go there for at this time of night, eh?”

  Lorimer didn’t know, really.

  “I’ve got to go and see about something, that’s all. I’m with the circus.”

  The policeman flashed his torch in Lorimer’s face.

  “You’re the trapeze bloke, aren’t you? Lorimer?”

  “That’s right. Lorimer and Loretta.”

  “Thought I recognized you. I’ve seen your pictures in the papers. Saw you when you were here last year, as well.”

  “Good. Did you enjoy the show?”

  “First-rate. I’d sooner have my job than yours, though. Flying through the air with the greatest of ease—not for the likes of me. Not with a figure like mine.”

  “What about this field, then?”

  “Less than five minutes from here. First on your left, and then straight ahead. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks. Good night.”

  “In case you don’t know—good morning.”

  Lorimer walked on, feeling considerably brighter. That was the sort of thing that made it worthwhile. Complete strangers—people on the street, policemen on their beat—stopping you and saying, “You’re the great Lorimer, aren’t you? Of the World’s Most Sensational Trapeze Artists, Lorimer and Loretta?” Perhaps not saying so in so many words, but that was what they meant. The bobby had seen his pictures in the papers. He remembered him from last year’s show. Fame…that was the thing that mattered. And, having got it, Lorimer was quite determined not to lose it, through Loretta and Carey, or through any other means.

  He went straight to the corner of the field where Joe Carey’s green-and-white caravan had been parked. He had left the hotel without any intention of doing more than clearing his head by a sharp walk. Now his mind was made up: he was going to have a chat with Joe Carey. A nice quiet chat—no rough business—just to find out exactly how things stood. He walked across the soft grass and came to within thirty yards
of the caravan. The lights were still on inside it; the green oil-silk curtains were only half drawn across the windows. The headlights of a car passing along the road at the side of the field threw up the bright paintwork of the caravan, and the neat black lettering on the side: Joseph Carey, Sole Proprietor, Carey’s World-Famous Circus and Menagerie. One day, Lorimer thought, a caravan would stand in a field with lettering on it announcing that Lorimer was sole proprietor of a circus, and a better one even than Carey’s.

  He was just going forward to the caravan when he realized that he was not alone. Two men were crossing from the far side of the field, making towards the caravan. There were some piles of scaffolding poles and bundles of canvas lying about, sent on by the advance men. Lorimer sat down on one of the canvas bales and watched.

  The men came straight to the caravan, looked round, ran quietly up the four steps. The taller of the two stood on the top step and whistled…a short, peculiar whistle. The door of the caravan opened no more than a couple of inches. A narrow slit of light shone out far across the grass. The taller of the two men came very close to the door, which was opened no further. He stayed there for perhaps half a minute, then elbowed his way past his companion, down the steps, and hurried off across the field. The performance was repeated with the other man. He, too, turned and disappeared. Not a word had been spoken. The night was still and Lorimer could easily have heard any conversation from where he was watching. The narrow slit of light vanished. The door of the caravan closed softly.