Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (2 page)

The believability of her characters is one of the hallmarks of Christianna Brand’s fiction. Good and bad, mean and generous, clever and dull, the players in her dramas are always fully rounded people whose actions and motivations have a solid foundation. A reviewer once wrote in the London
Daily Telegraph
, “Miss Brand is not merely a purveyor of thrills or a maker of puzzles. She is a novelist.” It might better have been said that she combines the arts of a novelist with a full measure of thrills and puzzles, and handles all ingredients with the same consummate skill. This skill is just as apparent in her short fiction as it is in her novels. And so we come at last to the offerings now spread before you.

One very important component of Christianna Brand’s career has so far been left out of the discussion. When she ceased writing detective novels in the mid-1950s, part of her attention was turned to the production of short stories. “Aren’t Our Police Wonderful?” appeared in the book
For Love or Money
(1957), an anthology of stories by members of the Mystery Writers of America. “After the Event,” the first short story to feature Inspector Cockrill, appeared during the following year in
Choice of Weapons
, a similar volume by members of Britain’s Crime Writers Association. (Christianna Brand is, of course, a member of both organizations, as well as of the Detection Club.) Stories continued to appear at intervals, both in magazines and in books, though never regularly nor frequently enough to satisfy the growing number of readers for whom the appearance of a new Christianna Brand story was an event. In 1966
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
sponsored a special short story contest for members of the Crime Writers Association, and the first prize went to Christianna Brand’s “The Hornets’ Nest” (under the title “Twist for Twist”). This story, as psychologically sound, intricate and surprising as any of her novels, was published in the magazine in 1967. A year later it took pride of place as the lead story in
What Dread Hand
, a collection of fifteen of the author’s stories. Although the book has not been published in the United States, most of the stories have appeared here individually, ten of them in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, Miss Brand’s most frequent short story market in the United States. Six years later another collection appeared, also published only in England:
Brand X
contains eighteen stories (one repeated from the earlier collection), of which fewer than half have been published in the United States. The
Buffet
now being offered contains seven stories from
What Dread Hand
and four from
Brand X
, as well as six stories not previously collected.

It is worth noting that for stories published both in England and in the United States there are sometimes considerable textual differences between the two versions. Among the present group this is most notable in the final paragraphs of “Murder Game.” The version included here is that preferred by the author.

Four of the stories included here feature Inspector Cockrill. Two of them are in a mode not explored in his book-length cases: the “inverted” detective story, in which the reader knows the identity of the guilty party, and may even have been a witness to the event. The suspense lies in just how (or if) the detective will uncover the clues and trap the culprit. Even in this type of story, including one told from the viewpoint of the murderer, the author can play amazing tricks. “
Is
the mind quicker than the eye?” Ellery Queen once asked in connection with one of these stories. When the mind is that of Christianna Brand (or her surrogate, Inspector Cockrill), the answer is not in doubt.

For the rest: there are stories of crime committed, crime concealed, crime revealed by the unpredictable workings of fate; stories of cleverness gone awry, of “the biter bit”; and straightforward (if anything by this author could ever deserve the term) tales of suspense. All are told with economy and style, with a distinctive combination of compassion and ironic detachment—and with that absolutely maddening ability to nourish a clue before the reader’s eyes while simultaneously preventing its significance from being recognized.

Do not, by the way, take the title of this volume too seriously. At this table there
are
no unwelcome guests.

¹
“Stakeout in Stockholm: Crime Writers’ Congress,”
The Washington Post
, 19 July 1981.

‘Y
ES, I THINK I MAY CLAIM,’
said the Grand Old Man (of Detection) complacently, ‘that in all my career I never failed to solve a murder case. In the end,’ he added, hurriedly, having caught Inspector Cockrill’s beady eye.

Inspector Cockrill had for the past hour found himself in the position of the small boy at a party who knows how the conjurer does his tricks. He suggested: ‘The
Othello
case?’ and sat back and twiddled his thumbs.

‘As in the
Othello
case,’ said the Great Detective, as though he had not been interrupted at all. ‘Which, as I say, I solved. In the end,’ he added again, looking defiantly at Inspector Cockrill.

‘But too late?’ suggested Cockie: regretfully.

The great one bowed. ‘In as far as certain evidence had, shall we say?—faded—yes: too late. For the rest, I unmasked the murderer: I built up a water-tight case against him: and I duly saw him triumphantly brought to trial. In other words, I think I may fairly say—that I solved the case.’

‘Only, the jury failed to convict,’ said Inspector Cockrill.

He waved it aside with magnificence. A detail. ‘As it happened, yes; they failed to convict.’

‘And quite right too,’ said Cockie; he was having a splendid time.

‘People round me were remarking, that second time I saw him play Othello,’ said the Great Detective, ‘that James Dragon had aged twenty years in as many days. And so he may well have done; for in the past three weeks he had played, night after night, to packed audiences—night after night strangling his new Desdemona, in the knowledge that his own wife had been so strangled but a few days before; and that every man Jack in the audience believed it was he who had strangled her—believed he was a murderer.’

‘Which, however, he was not,’ said Inspector Cockrill, and his bright elderly eyes shone with malicious glee.

‘Which he was—and was not,’ said the old man heavily. He was something of an actor himself but he had not hitherto encountered the modern craze for audience-participation and he was not enjoying it at all. ‘If I might now be permitted to continue without interruption…?’

‘Some of you may have seen James Dragon on the stage,’ said the old man, ‘though the company all migrated to Hollywood in the end. But none of you will have seen him as Othello—after that season, Dragon Productions dropped it from their repertoire. They were a great theatrical family—still are, come to that, though James and Leila, his sister, are the only ones left nowadays; and as for poor James—getting very
passé
, very
passé
indeed,’ said the Great Detective pityingly, shaking his senile head.

‘But at the time of the murder, he was in his prime; not yet thirty and at the top of his form. And he was splendid. I see him now as I saw him that night, the very night she died—towering over her as she lay on the great stage bed, tricked out in his tremendous costume of black and gold, with the padded chest and shoulders concealing his slenderness and the great padded, jewel-studded sleeves like cantaloupe melons, raised above his head: bringing them down, slowly, slowly, until suddenly he swooped like a hawk and closed his dark-stained hands on her white throat. And I hear again Emilia’s heartbreak cry in the lovely Dragon family voice: “Oh, thou hast killed the sweetest innocent, That e’er did lift up eye…” ’

But she had not been an innocent—James Dragon’s Desdemona, Glenda Croy, who was in fact his wife. She had been a thoroughly nasty piece of work. An aspiring young actress, she had blackmailed him into marriage for the sake of her career; and that had been all of a piece with her conduct throughout. A great theatrical family was extremely sensitive to blackmail even in those more easy-going days of the late nineteen-twenties; and in the first rush of the Dragons’ spectacular rise to fame, there had been one or two unfortunate episodes, one of them even culminating in a—very short—prison sentence: which, however, had effectively been hushed up. By the time of the murder, the Dragons were a byword for a sort of magnificent untouchability. Glenda Croy, without ever unearthing more than a grubby little scandal here and there, could yet be the means of dragging them all back into the mud again.

James Dragon had been, in the classic manner, born—at the turn of the century—backstage of a provincial theatre: had lustily wailed from his property basket while Romeo whispered through the mazes of Juliet’s ball-dance, ‘Just before curtain-up. Both doing splendidly. It’s a boy!’; had been carried on at the age of three weeks, and at the age often formed with his sister such a precious pair of prodigies that the parents gave up their own promising careers to devote themselves to the management of their children’s affairs. By the time he married, Dragon Productions had three touring companies always on the road and a regular London Shakespeare season, with James Dragon and Leila, his sister, playing the leads. Till he married a wife.

From the day of his marriage, Glenda took over the leads. They fought against it, all of them, the family, the whole company, James himself: but Glenda used her blackmail with subtlety, little hints here, little threats there, and they were none of them proof against it—James Dragon was their ‘draw’, with him they all stood or fell. So Leila stepped back and accepted second leads and for the good of them all, Arthur Dragon, the father, who produced for the company as well as being its manager did his honest best with the new recruit: and so got her through her Juliet (to a frankly mature Romeo), her Lady Macbeth, her Desdemona; and at the time of her death was breaking his heart rehearsing her Rosalind, preparatory to the company’s first American tour.

Rosalind was Leila Dragon’s pet part. ‘But, Dad, she’s hopeless, we
can’t
have her prancing her way across America grinning like a coy hyena: do speak to James again…’

‘James can’t do anything, my dear.’

‘Surely by this time… It’s three years now, we were all so certain it wouldn’t last a year.’

‘She knows where her bread is buttered,’ said the lady’s father-in-law, sourly.

‘But now, having played with
us
—she could strike out on her own?’

‘Why should she want to? With us, she’s safe—and she automatically plays our leads.’

‘If only she’d fall for some man…’

‘She won’t do that; she’s far too canny,’ said Arthur Dragon. ‘That would be playing into our hands. And she’s interested in nothing but getting on; she doesn’t bother with men.’ And, oddly enough, after a pass or two, men did not bother with her.

A row blew up over the Rosalind part, which rose to its climax before the curtain went up on
‘Venice
.
A Street’
, on the night that Glenda Croy died. It rumbled through odd moments offstage, and through the intervals, spilled over into hissed asides between Will Shakespeare’s lines, and culminated in a threat spat out with the venom of a viper as she lay on the bed, with the great arms raised above her, ready to pounce and close hands about her throat. Something about ‘gaol’. Something about ‘prisoners’. Something about the American tour.

It was an angry and a badly frightened man who faced her, twenty minutes later, in her dressing-room. ‘What did you mean, Glenda, by what you said on-stage?—during the death scene. Gaolbirds, prisoners—what did you mean, what was it you said?’

She had thrown on a dressing-gown at his knock and now sat calmly on the divan, peeling off her stage stockings. ‘I meant that I am playing Rosalind in America. Or the company is not going to America.’

‘I don’t see the connection,’ he said.

‘You will,’ said Glenda.

‘But, Glenda, be sensible, Rosalind just isn’t your part.’

‘No,’ said Glenda. ‘It’s dear Leila’s part. But I am playing Rosalind—or the company is not going to America.’

‘Don’t
you
want to go to America?’

‘I can go any day I like. You can’t. Without me, Dragon Productions stay home.’

‘I have accepted the American offer,’ he said steadily. ‘I am taking the company out. Come if you like—playing Celia.’

She took off one stocking and tossed it over her shoulder, bent to slide the other down, over a round white knee. ‘No one is welcomed into America who has been a gaolbird.’ she said.

‘Oh—that’s it?’ he said. ‘Well, if you mean me…’ But he wavered. ‘There was a bit of nonsense… Good God, it was years ago… And anyway, it was all rubbish, a bit of bravado, we were all wild and silly in those days before the war…’

‘Explain all that to the Americans,’ she said.

‘I’ve no doubt I’d be able to,’ he said, still steadily. ‘If they ever found out, which I doubt they ever would.’ But his mind swung round on itself. ‘This is a new—mischief—of yours, Glenda. How did you find it out?’

‘I came across a newspaper cutting.’ She gave a sort of involuntary glance back over her shoulder; it told him without words spoken that the paper was here in the room. He caught at her wrist. ‘Give that cutting to me!’

She did not even struggle to free her hand; just sat looking up at him with her insolent little smile. She was sure of herself. ‘Help yourself. It’s in my handbag. But the information’s still at the newspaper office, you know—and here in my head, facts, dates, all the rest of it. Plus any little embellishments I may care to add.’ He relaxed his grip and she freed her hand without effort and sat gently massaging the wrist. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said, ‘what lies people will believe, if you base them on a hard core of truth.’

He called her a filthy name and, standing there, blind with his mounting disgust and fury, added filth to filth. She struck out at him then like a wild cat, slapping him violently across the face with the flat of her hand. At the sharp sting of the slap, his control gave way. He raised his arms above his head and brought them down—slowly, slowly with a menace infinitely terrible: and closed his hands about her throat and shook her like a rag doll—and flung her back on to the bed and started across the room in search of the paper. It was in her handbag as she had said. He took it and stuffed it into his pocket and went back and stood triumphantly over her.