Dancing Death Read online

  Little Levington Hall, the site of the seasonal house party in Dancing Death, is owned by Martin Braishe, inventor of a gas in which the War Office has taken a great interest, on account of its “amazingly lethal properties.” Unfortunately for Braishe and his houseguests, however, the fancy-dress ball that Braishe hosts at Little Levington Hall might more accurately be described as a fancy-death ball. After the formal festivities have taken place place, nine guests remain at the Hall, along with a retinue of servants, including the butler, Pollock; the housekeeper, Mrs. Cairns; a lady’s maid named Ransome; and a footman named William. It is at this point that dead bodies most inconveniently begin to turn up at Little Levington Hall, like so many unwanted Christmas presents. (Sadly, it is hard to regift a corpse.)

  The houseguests fated to stay--and in some cases pass away--at Little Levington Hall are George Paradine, medico in high places, and Celia Paradine, his formidable wife; mercurial stage actress Mirabel Quest and her lofty sister, Brenda Fewne, vicar’s daughters of rather different hues (Recalling the celebrated lines from the 2005 film Capote—“It’s as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. He stood up and went out the back door, while I went out the front.”—Bush writes of the sisters, “Brenda seemed to have left the vicarial nest by crossing the lawn to the duke’s castle; Mirabel to have eloped from a back window with the frowsy leader of a pierrot troupe.”); Brenda’s husband, Denis, a novelist; Tommy Wildernesse, young man-about-town; stage producer Wyndham Challis, dismissed as a “cheap little vulgarian” by Brenda; and, last but certainly not least, our old friends Ludovic “Ludo” Travers, amiable, horn-rimmed author of Economics of a Spendthrift and something of a gentleman amateur detective, and Ludo’s colleague John Franklin, still head of the Enquiry Agency at Durangos Limited. (It might be remiss of me not to give brief mention as well to Ho-Ping, Celia Paradine’s huffing and puffing Peke—the only character in the novel who is not “utterly fictitious” according to the author.)

  On the morning after the ball, an unexpected guest turns up at the breakfast table, cheerfully consuming toast and marmalade: one Crashaw, a schoolmaster at Westover, “the most expensive prep school in England,” who explains that his car “conked out altogether in a drift,” forcing him to seek shelter at the Hall. Soon afterward, many an unsettling thing is discovered at Little Levington Hall. Two of the guests are found dead, one of them in the house, still in the previous night’s costume, and the other in a pagoda on the lawn, “contorted in the midst of a lot of exploded toy balloons,” as one delighted book reviewer, a connoisseur of the fantastical in murder, put it. Additionally, some of the guests’ rooms have been burgled and a cylinder of Braishe’s incredibly lethal gas has gone missing. The Hall having become enshrouded in snow overnight and the telephone lines having been cut, John Franklin treks overland to reach the police on foot, leaving Travers on the scene of the crimes, free to indulge his penchant for amateur detection. Despite Travers’ best efforts, however, a third death takes place at the Hall before the police finally put in an appearance, two-thirds of the way into the novel.

  The police contingent at Little Levington Hall is led by another personage who by now was familiar to Bush fans: Superintendent Wharton, one of the Yard’s Big Five, who with his “old-fashioned glasses” and drooping moustache looks like a “burlier Chester Conklin” (this a reference to a film comedian who had been extremely popular in the recent pre-talkie era). However, in marked contrast with many of the frequently brusque and bumbling police detectives of Golden Age detective fiction, Wharton is a smoothly astute professional and most decidedly nobody’s fool (unless he decides deliberately to play one):

  He was so quietly paternal in appearance, so disarmingly jovial, so obviously understanding and sympathetic, that he might have been a popular medical practitioner. As to his colossal patience, his tenacious memory, and his occasional outbursts of perfectly terrifying and snarling indignation, these were sides that the unwary never expected. And he was a good mixer. He could be deferential, suave, retiring; even a damn fool, if circumstances demanded it.

  With the belated appearance of the police, Ludo Travers is able to perform some longer-distance detection, and from there events move swiftly to a smash climax. Modern fans of classic crime fiction should be impressed indeed when they see just how dexterously Bush has managed his fiendishly complex plot, which includes a floor plan (relevant), a ground plan (including the fatal pagoda) and an illustration of the last scrawled words of one of the murder victims. As in Bush’s The Perfect Murder Case, the first chapter is “by way of a prologue,” and is constituted of a series of vignettes, drawn by Travers himself, of the case’s “high lights and solutions and straight dope”. It concludes with a cryptic parable, drawn by an author who was well-churched in his youth: a challenge to the reader, if you will, done in the best baroque Golden Age manner. Make of it what you can, dear readers:

  There were two men in one city; the one rich and the other poor.

  The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds;

  But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb…it did eat of his own meat, and drink of his own cup, and lay in his bosom.

  For many years, when the Queen of Crime Agatha Christie was still alive, fans of classic mystery intensely looked forward to reading their annual “Christie for Christmas.” Let us hope they did not forget to include a Bush for Boxing Day.

  CHAPTER I

  TRAVERS DRAWS THE CURTAIN

  LUDOVIC TRAVERS refused immediately and absolutely to have anything to do with the writing of this account. The very first hints were enough to produce the refusal, and after that there was no particular point in marshalling arguments, of which the first would certainly have been that thanks to the circumstances in which he found himself, the case had been his from start to finish. Then might have come a short dissertation on the refreshingly original methods of an amateur when left to his own devices and resources.

  All that, however, was unsaid. Travers must have seen something of the disappointment his refusal was causing, because in addition to the diffidence of his manner when it was made, he threw out a palliative hint in another direction—half an hour later, at tea.

  “Things seem very different when you look back on them,” he said suddenly. “Don’t you think so?”

  “What things?”

  “Well—er—murder cases. Take that perfectly horrible affair at Levington. At first thought you’d say the—er—high lights were the events themselves—a knife thrust, a sudden gripping of a neck, a man in ghastly convulsions with the light full on, waiting for death and not knowing it. As a matter of fact, from the angle of this armchair they seem disproportionately unimportant.”

  I caught a smile which seemed helpful, if not generous. At any rate, it gave me my idea.

  “Do you know, Ludo,” I said; “I think you’re wise not to tackle the whole book. There are people who might accuse you of prejudice or personal interest. But there is something you might do for us instead. Just a brief account of those things you do think important: you know—the kind of thing you did for us once before!1”

  He gave me a shrewd look. “Don’t you think people would rather find the high lights for themselves?”

  “Not in the least!” I assured him. “Just hint at what led up to everything. Tell us the things you wished you had known. Let the solution stare people clean in the eye, if they’d like to find it.”

  “Exactly!” His face showed he was amused at something. “I rather thought of offering you something of the sort—if you cared to have it! I don’t mind owning up that I’ve interviewed Clerke—Wharton dug him up for me.”

  “Clerke! Who on earth’s he?”

  He smiled again. “But I thought you knew the case from A to Z!”

  “Well, I thought I did.”

  “Hm! And I’ve also seen Reid.”

  That was really too much. “Here, I say, Ludo! What’s the idea?”

  He shrugged his shoulders
humorously. “You mean to say you don’t know Reid?”

  “I certainly don’t—not by name.”

  He laughed. “Capital! Then you’ll do to practise on! I suppose, by the way, you don’t want the reader led up the orchard, so to speak?”

  “Heavens, no! That’d be unpardonable! You’ve got to write perfectly straight dope.”

  “I see.” Then he gave me one of his old whimsical looks. “Of course you realize, as I did when I first thought about it, that you’re asking me to exhibit myself as a first-class idiot!”

  “Heaven forbid!” said I hastily. “But how do you mean, precisely?”

  “Well, looking at these things in cold blood, in conjunction with what happened in the house, anybody could see that only a fool could have missed ’em. People don’t get flurried, you see, in cold blood. Now, I was flurried. I don’t mind telling you I was scared—badly scared. I missed everything. Even when Wharton gave me the tip that morning when I set off to Folkestone, I couldn’t see it!”

  “I don’t think I’d worry about that if I were you,” I consoled him, though I rather guessed there was more leg-pulling in it than apprehension. “What about that epigram of yours that I always enjoy so much—‘It’s only the fools who never make mistakes’?”

  So much for that. As for Ludovic Travers’s ideas of high lights and solutions and straight dope, well, here they are; just as they were copied from his manuscript.

  A

  Chief Detective Inspector Clerke was most unlike a detective in those leisure moments of his that came immediately after an evening meal. Within five minutes of swallowing the last mouthful, he would have his pipe alight, and having put on an old blazer and got into his favourite chair, with slippered feet on a hassock, he would reach for the detective story he or his wife had got from the local circulating library and settle down to an evening’s criticism. At his elbow would be his notebook.

  Occasionally, of course, he was disappointed. There were rare evenings when a book either satisfied his professional judgment or proved so holding that errors of fact were never jotted down. Generally, however, there would be a grunt or a snort, and his wife knew what was coming. That was what happened that December night—with important variations.

  Mrs. Clerke had looked hastily through the pair of novels her husband had brought in, to see if either contained a love interest, however fleeting. One did —Murder at Murforde. The other—The Shot in the Night—was apparently as bare of females as Crusoe’s island; that was why she put it at her husband’s hand and left the other for herself. But something unforeseen happened. She had read half a chapter when there came from the other side of the fireplace a snort of unusual violence. The Shot in the Night went flying across the room and landed against the couch.

  There was a mild expostulation. “Whatever are you doing!”

  “Doing! Hm!” He sat up and scowled. “That damn book’s the limit!” He got to his feet angrily, fetched the offending volume, and with thrust-out finger indicated the final straw.

  “Look at that! A detective asks for a warrant to arrest a man for murder! A warrant!”

  His wife took refuge in generalities. “I don’t know why they write such things!”

  “Damned ignorance! or laziness! That’s what it is! They think if they put in a detective the public’ll swallow anything!”

  He got into his seat again, threw the book contemptuously on the floor, and sat scowling over his pipe. Murder at Murforde was laid aside in sympathy, and the knitting was got out. A quarter of an hour of that, and her husband got to his feet and drew a bentwood chair up to the small bureau.

  “What is it, dear? Going to work?”

  “No! Going to write to The Times.”

  “Oh, but they’ll never print it!”

  “I don’t know so much about that!”

  The event was one that left her speechless. She knitted and watched. An hour went by before the letter was copied out from the much corrected original. Then he handed it over with the air of a man who thinks a job well done.

  To the Editor of The Times.

  DEAR SIR:

  I have been very much struck and annoyed recently by the inaccuracies and absurdities which are occurring with monotonous regularity in the numerous detective novels which are being published.

  In fiction, the professional detective is supposed to obtain ideas from the perusal of works of this kind. All I obtain, in nine cases out of ten, is exasperation at the stupidity or laziness of the author who will not trouble to verify his material. On the list enclosed with this letter I give the names of books and authors that have offended in this way; with comments on the points in question that must convince you of the truth of my statements.

  There is one other important fact arising out of this question. If authors make these mistakes about the routine work of Scotland Yard and the police generally, must it not be a fact that they make precisely the same kind of mistakes over technicalities in other professions—the legal, the medical, and so on?

  It is time that a public so well informed as that of today took the matter up. If every professional man who found in novels statements which are travesties of fact exposed the authors, I venture to think there would be very much more attention paid to the matter of local colour.

  I enclose my card, and am, sir,

  Yours faithfully,

  CHIEF DETECTIVE INSPECTOR.

  B

  Walter Reid often looked back on that cold December Saturday as one of the luckiest in his life. From the very first, everything turned out so well that he was continually being startled. Moreover, the firm was extraordinarily pleased, and for a newcomer like himself that was decidedly cheering. Everything had gone with amazing smoothness. The suspect had never seemed to be alarmed. There had been no attempt at dodging; the man was plainly as unaware as a week-old kitten. The whole of that long journey to Finchley the taxi had gone direct, and, as far as he could see, never a soul had looked back from it to the car behind.

  The first sight of the house, however, had given him a certain trepidation. It was a bare fifty yards back from the road—and a well lighted road at that, with trams clanking by, and a constant stream of cars. Then had come reassurance. The district was a high-class residential one, with neighbours reasonably separated. Round the approaches were shrubberies which a merciful providence had made evergreen. Then there was a side entrance to back door and garage, so there hadn’t been much risk after all in getting right up to the window once the dusk fell and the light appeared in a downstairs room. And a window was open for ventilation! And one of the voices had been of that slow, drawling type that gives you time to think and memorize.

  There had been only one real difficulty. The downstairs lights went out shortly after nine. A move was evidently about to be made, either upstairs or back to town. So he’d backed into the bushes in sight of the garage. Half an hour later there was still a light in the bedroom. In a few seconds it went out. A retirement, evidently, for the night. Fifteen feet above his head was an open window and no possibility of listening at it—and that was a pity! The night, and a situation so romantic, were certain to breed confidences. Everything overheard should be vital and intimate.

  He’d tried to think of a solution. There wasn’t one. Never a tree handy enough or an inch of foothold to climb up by. It was infuriating! There was the open window of a bedroom well sheltered from the road, and heaven knew what waiting to be heard. Out he’d moved again, over the sodden grass and round to the outhouses. If only, by some extraordinary chance, a shed could be broken into—and in that shed there should be a ladder!

  Then he saw something that made him doubt his eyes. He felt it. It was a ladder, under the eaves! A gardening ladder, by the size of it, left there tucked away for the winter!

  He took it down quietly, tested his weight on the rungs, then left it while he surveyed the ground to secure a hasty line of retreat. Next he sacrificed his muffler and, with a piece of string, wrapped it rou
nd the ends of the ladder to deaden the sound. Then, with infinite precaution, he got it round and, almost half an inch at a time, lowered it into position. Lastly came his own progress, deadly slow, up the ladder till his ear was level with the open window. The first words he heard were these.

  “How can they suspect anything? We’ve only got to be reasonably careful!”

  The other voice muttered drowsily.

  C

  Denis Fewne was restless. There he was, pacing up and down the small pagoda, hands deep in his coat pockets; pausing every now and then to look at the snow or lean back against the writing desk to speak to Braishe or answer his questions.

  Martin Braishe was perfectly comfortable in the easy chair against the open fireplace. As Denis perambulated with his back towards him, he would give a puzzled look. Sometimes his eye seemed to dwell on the old camp bed that stood by the longer match-boarded wall, where the hectic stripes of Fewne’s pajamas glared against the soberer colouring.

  Fewne turned round and retraced his steps. Then he leaned against the desk.

  “Do you know, Martin, you’re an uncommonly good chap! I owe you a frightful lot!”

  Braishe laughed. “Rubbish! You owe me nothing. This is your own home—you know that. And it’s awful fun to have you here.”

  “You’re too generous, Martin.” He paused for a moment or two, then turned and looked out of the window. “How on earth am I ever going to repay you?”

  Braishe looked distinctly bewildered. What was the matter with Denis? Getting nervy, or morbid, or what? He’d never talked all that drivel before.

  “Repay me!” He laughed good-humouredly. “My dear old chap, there’s no question of repayment between you and me! I mean—er—one’s got to do something before one can be repaid, and all that sort of thing.”