He was boyishly excited. ‘What did you think of the show?’
We gushed, gushingly. It really wasn’t difficult to be very enthusiastic and complimentary. Lady Hardcastle told him the joke the acrobat had told.
When he had finally finished guffawing, he wiped his eyes and said, ‘Those cheeky beggars. I always wondered what all that chatter was about. I thought they were explaining their great acrobatic tradition or something.’
‘There was certainly an element of acrobatics involved,’ she said with a grin.
He began giggling again and was about to say something further when there was a tap on the tent pole. We looked over and saw a grim-faced Mickey O’Bannon waiting to attract our attention.
‘Ah, Mickey,’ said Colonel Dawlish. ‘Lady Hardcastle was just telling me what those blighters the Chinese acrobats are saying every night.’
‘Filthy jokes in Mandarin, sir,’ replied Mickey, flatly.
‘You knew? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I was worried you might stop them, sir. I was rather enjoying them.’
‘I see. Heigh ho.’
‘Sorry, sir, but I’m afraid I’ve bad news.’
‘Not today, Mickey. No bad news today, I forbid it.’
‘Sorry, sir, but you’d better come. You, too, Lady Hardcastle. And Miss Armstrong.’
‘What is it, Mickey?’ asked Colonel Dawlish, his buoyant mood deflating rapidly.
‘Just come, sir. The Big Top.’
Reluctantly, Colonel Dawlish put down his coffee and gestured for us to follow. We made our way in silence to the main circus tent and entered through a tied-back tent flap which led into the artists’... the artists’ what? I wondered. It would be the green room in a theatre, I suppose; it was a sort of marshalling area where they readied themselves before stepping out into the spotlight to perform. We carried on through and I caught sight of Colonel Dawlish’s increasingly anxious face as we passed a row of large mirrors. Presently we entered a canvas tunnel and emerged into the ring.
A small group of lads was clustered in a circle near the edge of the ring to our right. They looked round when they heard us enter and then shuffled aside to reveal something large and oddly glittery on the sand between them. As we approached I saw that it was a body in a black leotard with gold-sequinned trim. A few steps more and I realized with a shock that it was the large, muscular body of Abraham Bernbaum, twisted and broken, and very obviously dead.
Colonel Dawlish knelt by the body and touched the skin of his face. ‘Who found him?’ he asked.
‘I did, Colonel,’ said the young stable lad we’d spoken to the day before. ‘I was just coming in to rake the sand for Sabine and there he was.’
Colonel Dawlish looked up at Lady Hardcastle. ‘He’s been dead a while, I’d say. His skin’s cold to the touch.’
‘The doctor will be able to get a better idea,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t help much. It just means he died in the middle of the night like Mr Parvin. It’s unlikely anyone would have seen anything. Mr O’Bannon, have you sent for the police?’
‘Yes,’ said Mickey. ‘I sent one of the lads off while I was fetching you.’
It seemed obvious that Abraham had fallen from a great height and I looked up to see where he might have been. Almost directly above the spot where he lay was one of the trapeze platforms.
‘Ladies,’ said Colonel Dawlish standing up, ‘we need to talk privately. Mickey, take care of everything here. As it stands it looks as though Abe killed the others and topped himself out of guilt. Suggest strongly that this wraps things up but don’t commit to anything. If the sergeant asks, we’ll be in my tent, but don’t volunteer it unless he actually does ask. I need to do some thinking.’
‘Right you are, Colonel,’ said Mickey.
We left the way we had come.
Colonel Dawlish had stopped at the mess to collect a fresh pot of coffee and was pouring it for us as we sat once more in his canvas chairs.
‘What do you think, then, Emily? Suicide? Is he our man? Can we draw a line under all this?’
‘It would be tragic but convenient, that’s certain,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘He killed Parvin in the lion cage, stove Noakes’s head in with an iron weight and then, overcome with guilt, took his own life by jumping from the trapeze. I know of an Inspector in Bristol who would be more than happy to close the case based on that.’
‘But what do you think?’ he asked.
‘I’m still not happy with it at all. I don’t pretend ever to know what goes on in the mind of my fellow man, but from everything I do know, murder is rarely without reason. Even the insane man kills according to his own private logic. But we have no reason to think that Abraham was insane, and I can see no sane motive for his having killed Parvin. If he bore any grudge at all – and the more I’ve heard about him over the past days, the less I believe him capable of even that – it was against Augustus Noakes, the lion tamer. We had our convoluted hypothesis about his trying to implicate Noakes in Parvin’s murder, but I think that sank without trace when we found Noakes dead.’
Something about the murders was niggling at me, a half-understood idea that I couldn’t quite place. And then, ‘Oh!’ I said suddenly, reminding myself of Veronica.
‘Yes dear?’ said Lady Hardcastle.
‘Am I imagining it, my lady, or is there a pattern?’
‘There are always patterns. Sometimes they’re patterns we imagine, but there are always patterns. What’s yours?’
‘Well,’ I said, trying to marshal my thoughts, ‘The juggler was killed by lions. The lions were tended to by the lion tamer and the lion tamer was crushed with heavy weights. The heavy weights are part of the strongman’s act, and the strongman was killed by a fall from the trapeze platform. The first two deaths are related to the second two victims. Do you see?’
‘I think so,’ she said, slowly. ‘But how does that help us?’
‘Well what if the trapeze lady… what was her name?’
‘Prudence,’ said Colonel Dawlish.
‘Prudence, that’s it. What if she were next? Did she have any grudge against Abraham?’
‘Only of the vaguest sort. Prudence’s brother was crippled in a fall from a poorly secured platform and the original story was that Abraham had been responsible for the accident by not checking the rigging as he had been supposed to. But the investigation found that there was a fault with one of the cables and that Elias Hallows had been too drunk to notice it when he went up there. It was nothing to do with Abe, but he was briefly blamed at the time.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘So Augustus Noakes had a reason to kill Hubert Parvin, and Abraham Bernbaum had a reason to kill Augustus Noakes. And now Bernbaum is dead and Prudence Hallows had a reason to kill him.’
‘Hell’s bells!’ exclaimed Colonel Dawlish, jumping to his feet and going out to the walkway between the tents. ‘Runner!’ he shouted.