Five Red Herrings Read Free Page B

was tired and fretted, and sick of his own lonely, uncomfortable shack of a place, to go and sit among the cool greens and blues of Gilda Farren’s sitting-room and be soothed by her slim beauty and comforting voice. And Farren, with no more sense or imagination than a bull, must come blundering in, breaking the spell, putting his own foul interpretation on the thing, trampling the lilies in Campbell’s garden of refuge. No wonder Farren’s landscapes looked as if they were painted with an axe. The man had no delicacy. His reds and blues hurt your eyes, and he saw life in reds and blues. If Farren were to die, now, if one could take his bull-neck in one’s hands and squeeze it till his great staring blue eyes popped out like — he laughed — like bull’s eyes — that was a damned funny joke. He’d like to tell Farren that and see how he took it.
    Farren was a devil, a beast, a bully, with his artistic temperament, which was nothing but inartistic temper. There was no peace with Farren about. There was no peace anywhere. If he went back to Gatehouse, he knew what he would find there. He had only to look out of his bedroom window to see Jock Graham whipping the water just under the wall of the house — doing it on purpose to annoy him. Why couldn’t Graham leave him alone? There was better fishing up by the dams. The whole thing was sheer persecution. It wasn’t any good, either, to go to bed and take no notice. They would wake him up in the small hours, banging at his window and bawling out the number of their catch — they might even leave a contemptuous offering of trout on his window-sill, wretched little fish like minnows, which ought to have been thrown back again. He only hoped Graham would slip up on the stones one night and fill his waders and be drowned among his infernal fish. The thing that riled him most of all was that this nightly comedy was played out under the delighted eye of his neighbour, Ferguson. Since that fuss about the garden-wall, Ferguson had become absolutely intolerable.
    It was perfectly true, of course, that he had backed his car into Ferguson’s wall and knocked down a stone or two, but if Ferguson had left his wall in decent repair it wouldn’t have done any damage. That great tree of Ferguson’s had sent its roots right under the wall and broken up the foundations, and what was more, it threw up huge suckers in Campbell’s garden. He was perpetually rooting the beastly things up. A man had no right to grow trees under a wall so that it tumbled down at the slightest little push, and then demand extravagant payments for repairs. He would not repair Ferguson’s wall. He would see Ferguson damned first.
    He gritted his teeth. He wanted to get out of this stifle of petty quarrels and have one good, big, blazing row with somebody. If only he could have smashed Waters’ face to pulp — let himself go — had the thing out, he would have felt better. Even now he could go back — or forward — it didn’t matter which, and have the whole blasted thing right out with somebody.
    He had been brooding so deeply that he never noticed the hum of a car in the distance and the lights flickering out and disappearing as the road dipped and wound. The first thing he heard was a violent squealing of brakes and an angry voice demanding:
    ‘What the bloody hell are you doing, you fool, sitting out like that in the damn middle of the road right on the bend?’ And then, as he turned, blinking in the glare of the headlights, to grapple with this new attack, he heard the voice say, with a kind of exasperated triumph:
    ‘Campbell. Of course. I might have known it couldn’t be anybody else.’
    CAMPBELL DEAD
    ‘Did ye hear about Mr. Campbell?’ said Mr. Murdoch of the McClellan Arms, polishing a glass carefully as a preparation for filling it with beer.
    ‘Why, what further trouble has he managed to get into since last night?’ asked Wimsey. He leaned an elbow on the bar and prepared to relish anything that might be offered to