Ngaio Marsh - Death of a Fool

“I knew,” Ernie volunteered. “He was a proper old miser, he was. Never let me have any, not for a wireless nor a telly nor nothing, he wouldn’t. I knew where he put it by, I did, but he kept watch over it like a bloody mastiff, so’s I dussn’t let on. Old tyrant, he was. Cruel hard and crankytankerous.”

Andy passed his great hand across his mouth and sighed. “Doan’t talk that way,” he said, lowering his voice and glancing towards Sergeant Obby, who had returned to duty. “What did we tell you?”

Dan agreed strongly. “Doan’t talk that way, you, Ern. You was a burden to him with your foolishness.”

“And a burden to us,” Nat added, “as it turns out. Heavy and anxious.”

“Get it into your thick head,” Chris advised Ernie, “that you’re born foolish and not up to our level when it comes to great affairs. Leave everything to us chaps. Doan’t say nothing and doan’t do nothing but what you was meant to do in the beginning.”

“Huh!” Ernie shouted. “I’ll larn ’em! Whang!” He made a wild swiping gesture.

“What’ll we do?” Andy asked, appealing to the others. “Listen to him!”

Ernie surveyed his horrified brothers with the greatest complacency. “You doan’t need to fret yourselves, chaps,” he said. “I’m not so silly as what you all think I am. I can keep my tongue behind my teeth, fair enough. I be one too many for the coppers. Got ’em proper baffled, I ’ave.”

“Shut up,” Chris whispered savagely.

“No, I won’t, then.”

“You will, if I have to lay you out first,” Chris muttered. He rose and walked across to his youngest brother. Chris was the biggest of the Andersens, a broad powerful man. He held his clenched fist in front of Ernie’s face as if it were an object of virtue. “You know me, Ern,” he said softly. “I’ve give you a hiding before this and never promised you one but what I’ve kept my word and laid it on solid. You got a taste last night. If you talk about — you know what — or open your silly damn’ mouth on any matter at all when we’re up-along, I’ll give you a masterpiece. Won’t I? Won’t I ?”

Ernie wiped his still-smiling mouth and nodded.

“You’ll whiffle and you’ll dance and you’ll go where you went and you’ll hold your tongue and you’ll do no more nor that. Right?”

Ernie nodded and backed away.

“It’s for the best, Ernie-boy,” the gentle Andy said. “Us knows what’s for the best.”

Ernie pointed at Chris and continued to back away from him.

“You tell him to lay off of me,” he said. “I know him . Keep him off of me.”

Chris made a disgusted gesture. He turned away and began to examine the tools near the anvil.

“You keep your hands off of me,” Ernie shouted after him. Sergeant Obby woke with a little snort.

“Don’t talk daft. There you go, see!” Nat ejaculated. “Talking proper daft.”

Dan said, “Now, listen, Ern. Us chaps doan’t want to know nothing but what was according to plan. What you done, Wednesday, was what you was meant to do: whiffle, dance, bit of larking with Mr. Ralph, wait your turn and dance again. Which you done. And that’s all you done. Nothing else. Doan’t act as if there was anything else. There wasn’t .”

“That’s right,” his brothers counselled, “that’s how ’tis.”

They were so much alike, they might indeed have been a sort of rural chorus. Anxiety looked in the same way out of all their faces; they had similar mannerisms; their shared emotion ran a simple course through Dan’s elderly persistence, Andy’s softness, Nat’s despair and Chris’s anger. Even Ernie himself, half defiant, half scared, reflected something of his brothers’ emotion.

And when Dan spoke again, it was as if he gave expression to this general resemblance.

“Us Andersens,” he said, “stick close. Always have and always will, I reckon. So long as we stay that fashion, all together, we’re right, souls. The day any of us cuts loose and sets out to act on his own, agin the better judgment of the others, will be the day of disaster. Mind that.”

Andy and Nat made sounds of profound agreement.

“All right!” Ernie said. “All right. I never said nothing.”

“Keep that way,” Dan said, “and you’ll do no harm. Mind that. And stick together, souls.”

There was a sudden metallic clang. Sergeant Obby leapt to his feet. Chris, moved by some impulse of violence, had swung his great hammer and struck the cold anvil.

It was as if the smithy had spoken with its own voice in support of Dan Andersen.

Mrs. Bünz made a long entry in her journal. For this purpose she employed her native language and it calmed her a little to form the words and see them, old familiars, stand in their orderly ranks across her pages. Mrs. Bünz had an instinctive respect for regimentation — a respect and a fear. She laid down her pen, locked away her journal and began to think about policemen: not about any specific officer but about the genus Policeman as she saw it and believed it to be. She remembered all the things that had happened to her husband and herself in Germany before the war and the formalities that had attended their arrival in England. She remembered the anxieties and discomforts of the first months of the war when they had continually to satisfy the police of their innocuous attitude, and she remembered their temporary incarceration while this was going on.

Mrs. Bünz did not put her trust in policemen.

She thought of Trixie’s inexplicable entrance into her room that morning at a moment when Mrs. Bünz had every reason not to desire a visit. Was Trixie, perhaps, a police agent? A most disturbing thought.

She went downstairs and ate what was, for her, a poor breakfast. She tried to read but was unable to concentrate. Presently, she went out to the shed where she kept the car she had bought from Simon Begg and, after a bit of a struggle, started up the engine. If she had intended to use the car she now changed her mind and, instead, took a short walk to Copse Forge. But the Andersen brothers were gathered in the doorway and responded very churlishly to the forced bonhomie of her greeting. She went to the village shop, purchased two faded postcards and was looked at sideways by the shopkeeper.

Next, Mrs. Bünz visited the church but, being a rationalist, received and indeed sought no spiritual solace there. It was old but, from her point of view, not at all interesting. A bas-relief of a fourteenth-century Mardian merely reminded her unpleasingly of Dame Alice.

As she was leaving, she met Sam Stayne coming up the path in his cassock. He greeted her very kindly. Encouraged by this manifestation, Mrs. Bünz pulled herself together and began to question him about the antiquities of South Mardian. She adopted a lomewhat patronizing tone that seemed to suggest a kind of intellectual unbending on her part. Her cold was still very heavy and lent to her manner a fortuitous air of complacency.

“I have been lookink at your little church,” she said.

“I’m glad you came in.”

“Of course, for me it is not, you will excuse me, as interestink as, for instance, the Copse Forge.”

“Isn’t it? It’s nothing of an archaeological ‘find,’ of course.”

“Perhaps you do not interest yourself in ritual dancing?” Mrs. Bünz suggested with apparent irrelevance but following up her own line of thought.

“Indeed I do,” Sam Stayne said warmly. “It’s of great interest to a priest, as are all such instinctive gestures.”

“But it is pagan.”

“Of course it is,” he said and began to look distressed. “As I see it,” he went on, choosing his words very carefully, “the Dance of the Sons is a kind of child’s view of a great truth. The Church, more or less, took the ceremony under her wing, you know, many years ago.”