Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 7: Off With His Head, Singing in the Shrouds, False Scent. Ngaio Marsh
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.
‘The solo was interesting –’
‘Wait a bit,’ Alleyn said. She gulped and blinked at him. ‘Now look here, Mrs Bünz. I’m going to put it to you that from the time the first dance ended with the mock death of the Fool until the solo began, you didn’t watch the proceedings at all. Now is that right?’
‘I was not interested –’
‘How could you know you wouldn’t be interested if you didn’t even look? Did you look, Mrs Bünz?’
She gaped at him with an expression of fear. She was elderly and frightened and he supposed that, in her mind, she associated him with monstrous figures of her past. He was filled with compunction.
Dr Otterly appeared to share Alleyn’s feeling. He walked over to her and said: ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Bünz. Really, there’s nothing to be frightened about, you know. They only want to get at the facts. Cheer up.’
His large doctor’s hand fell gently on her shoulder.
She gave a falsetto scream and shrank away from him.
‘Hallo!’ he said good-humouredly, ‘what’s all this? Nerves? Fibrositis?’
‘I – yes – yes. The cold weather.’
‘In your shoulders?’
‘Ja. Both.’
‘Mrs Bünz,’ Alleyn said, ‘will you believe me when I remind you of something I think you must already know? In England the Police Code has been most carefully framed to protect the public from any kind of bullying or overbearing behaviour on the part of investigating officers. Innocent persons have nothing to fear from us. Nothing. Do you believe that?’
It was difficult to hear what she said. She had lowered her head and spoke under her breath.
‘… because I am German. It does not matter to you that I was anti-Nazi; that I am naturalized. Because I am German, you will think I am capable. It is different for Germans in England.’
The three men raised a little chorus of protest. She listened without showing any sign of being at all impressed.
They think I am capable,’ she said, ‘of anything.’
‘You say that, don’t you, because of what Ernie Andersen shouted out when he stood last night on the dolmen?’
Mrs Bünz covered her face with her knotty little hands.
‘You remember what that was, don’t you?’ Alleyn asked.
Dr Otterly looked as if he would like to protest but caught Alleyn’s eye and said nothing.
Alleyn went on: ‘He pointed his sword at you, didn’t he, and said, “Ask her. She knows. She’s the one that did it.” Something like that, wasn’t it?’ He waited for a moment but she only rocked herself a little with her hands still over her face.
‘Why do you think he said that, Mrs Bünz?’ Alleyn asked.
In a voice so muffled that they had to strain their ears to hear her, she said something quite unexpected.
‘It is because I am a woman,’ said Mrs Bünz.
II
Try as he might, Alleyn could get no satisfactory explanation from Mrs Bünz as to what she implied by this statement or why she had made it. He asked her if she was thinking of the exclusion of women from ritual dances and she denied this with such vehemence that it was clear the question had caught her on the raw. She began to talk rapidly, excitedly and, to Mr Fox at least, embarrassingly, about the sex element in ritual dancing.
‘The man-woman!’ Mrs Bünz shouted. ‘An age-old symbol of fertility. And the Hobby, also, without a doubt. There must be the Betty to lover him and the Hobby to –’