Death of a Fool

“Confidential?” he ventured eagerly.

“That is the word for which I sought. Confidential.”

“I’m all for it, Mrs. B. I was going to make the same suggestion myself. Suits me.”

“I am immensely relieved. Immensely. I thank you, Wing-Commander. I trust, at the same time — you do not think — it would be so shawkink — if—”

“Eh?” He looked up from his paper to stare at her. “What’s that? No, no, no, Mrs. B. Not to worry. Not a chance. The idea’s laughable.”

“To me it is not amusink but I am glad you find it so,” Mrs. Bünz said stuffily. “You read something of interest, perhaps, in your newspaper?”

“I’m waiting. Teutonic Dancer. Get me? The one-thirty?”

Mrs. Bünz shuddered.

“Oh, well!” he said. “There you are. I follow the form as a general thing. Don’t go much for gimmicks. Still! Talk about coincidence! You couldn’t go past it, really, could you?” He raised an admonitory finger. The telephone had begun to ring in the passage. “My call,” he said. “This is it. Keep your fingers crossed, Mrs. B.”

He darted out of the room.

Mrs. Bünz, left alone, breathed uncomfortably through her mouth, blew her nose and clocked her tongue against her palate. “Dar,” she breathed.

Fox came down the passage past Simon, who was saying, “Hold the line, please, miss, for Pete’s sake. Hold the line,” and entered the parlour.

“Mrs. Burns?” he asked.

Mrs. Bünz, though she eyed him with evident misgivings, rallied sufficiently to correct him. “Eü, eü, eü,” she demonstrated windily through her cold. “Bünz.”

“Now that’s very interesting,” Fox said beaming at her. “That’s a noise, if you will excuse me referring to it as such, that we don’t make use of in English, do we? Would it be the same, now, as the sound in the French eu?” He arranged his sedate mouth in an agonized pout. “Deux diseuses,” said Mr. Fox by way of illustration. “Not that I get beyond a very rough approximation, I’m afraid.”

“It is not the same at all. Bünz.”

“Bünz,” mouthed Mr. Fox.

“Your accent is not perfect.”

“I know that,” he agreed heavily. “In the meantime, I’m forgetting my job. Mr. Alleyn presents his compliments and wonders if you’d be kind enough to give him a few minutes.”

“Ach! I too am forgetting. You are the police.”

“You wouldn’t think so, the way I’m ru

(Alleyn had said, “If she was an anti-Nazi refugee, she’ll think we’re ruthless automatons. Jolly her along a bit.”)

Mrs. Bünz gathered herself together and followed Fox. In the passage, Simon Begg was saying, “Look, old boy, all I’m asking for is the gen on the one-thirty. Look, old boy —”

Fox opened the door of the sitting-room and a

“Mrs. Bünz,” he said quite successfully.

As she advanced into the room Alleyn seemed to see, not so much a middle-aged German, as the generalization of a species. Mrs. Bünz was the lady who sits near the front at lectures and always asks questions. She has an enthusiasm for obscure musicians, stands nearest to guides, keeps handicraft shops of the better class and reads Rabindranath Tagore. She weaves, forms circles, gives talks, hand-throws pots and designs book-plates. She is sometimes a vegetarian, though not always a crank. Occasionally, she is an expert.

She walked slowly into the room and kept her gaze fixed on Alleyn. “She is afraid of me,” he thought.

“This is Mr. Alleyn, Mrs. Bünz,” Dr. Otterly said.

Alleyn shook hands with her. Her own short stubby hand was tremulous and the palm was damp. At his invitation, she perched warily on a chair. Fox sat down behind her and palmed his notebook out of his pocket.

“Mrs. Bünz,” Alleyn said, “in a minute or two I’m going to throw myself on your mercy.”

She blinked at him.

“Zo?” said Mrs. Bünz.

“I understand you’re an expert on folklore and, if ever anybody needed an expert, we do.”

“I have gone a certain way.”

“Dr. Otterly tells me,” Alleyn said, to that gentleman’s astonishment, “that you have probably gone as far as anyone in England.”

“Zo,” she said, with a magnificent inclination towards Otterly.

“But, before we talk about that, I suppose I’d better ask you the usual routine questions. Let’s get them over as soon as possible. I’m told that you gave Mr. William Andersen a lift —”

They were off again on the old trail, Alleyn thought dejectedly, and not getting much further along it. Mrs. Bünz’s account of the Guiser’s hitch-hike corresponded with what he had already been told.

“I was so delighted to drive him,” she began nervously. “It was a great pleasure to me. Once or twice I attempted, tactfully, to a little draw him out, but he was, I found, angry, and not inclined for cawnversation.”

“Did he say anything at all, do you remember?”

“To my recollection he spoke only twice. To begin with, he invited me by gesture to stop and, when I did so, he asked me in his splendid, splendid rich dialect, ‘Be you goink up-alongk?’ On the drive, he remarked that when he found Mr. Ernie Andersen he would have the skin off of his body. Those, however, were his only remarks.”

“And when you arrived?”

“He descended and hurried away.”

“And what,” Alleyn asked, “did you do?”

The effect of the question, casually put, upon Mrs. Bünz was extraordinary. She seemed to flinch back into her clothes as a tortoise into its shell.

“When you got there, you know,” Alleyn gently prompted her. “What did you do?”

Mrs. Bünz said in a cold-thickened voice, “I became a spectator. Of course.”

“Where did you stand?”

Her head sank a little further into her shoulders.

“Inside the archway.”

“The archway by the house as you come in?”

“Yes.”

“And, from there, you watched the dance?”

Mrs. Bünz wetted her lips and nodded.

“That must have been an absorbing experience. Had you any idea of what was in store for you?”

“Ach! No! No, I swear it! No!” she almost shouted.

“I meant,” Alleyn said, “in respect of the dance itself.”

“The dance,” Mrs. Bünz said in a strangulated croak, “is unique.”

“Was it all that you expected?”

“But, of course!” She gave a little gasp and appeared to be horror-stricken. “Really,” Alleyn thought, “I seem to be having almost too much success with Mrs. Bünz. Every shy a coconut.”

She had embarked on an elaborate explanation. All folk dance and drama had a common origin. One expected certain elements. The amazing thing about the Five Sons was that it combined so rich an assortment of these elements as well as some remarkable features of its own. “It has everythink. But everythink,” she said and was plagued by a Gargantuan sneeze.

“And did they do it well?”

Mrs. Bünz said they did it wonderfully well. The best performance for sheer execution in England. She rallied from whatever shock she had suffered and began to talk incomprehensibly of galleys, split-jumps and double capers. Not only did she remember every move of the Five Sons and the Fool in their twice-repeated dance, but she had noted the positions of the Betty and Hobby. She remembered how these two pranced round the perimeter and how, later on, the Betty chased the young men and flung his skirts over their heads and the Hobby stood as an image behind the dolmen. She remembered everything.

“This is astonishing,” he said, “for you to retain the whole thing, I mean, after seeing it only once. Extraordinary. How do you do it?”

“I–I — have a very good memory,” said Mrs. Bünz and gave an agonized little laugh. “In such matters my memory is phenomenal.” Her voice died away. She looked remarkably uncomfortable. He asked her if she took notes and she said at once she didn’t, and then seemed in two minds whether to contradict herself.

Her description of the dance tallied in every respect with the accounts he had already been given, with one exception. She seemed to have only the vaguest recollection of the Guiser’s first entrance when, as Alleyn had already been told, he had jogged round the arena and struck the Mardian dolmen with his clown’s bladder. But, from then onwards, Mrs. Bünz knew everything right up to the moment when Ralph stole Ernie’s sword. After that, for a short period, her memory seemed again to be at fault. She remembered that, somewhere about this time, the Hobby-Horse went off, but had apparently forgotten that Ernie gave chase after Ralph and only had the vaguest recollection, if any, of Ralph’s improvised fooling with Ernie’s sword. Moreover, her own uncertainty at this point seemed to embarrass her very much. She blundered about from one fumbled generalization to another.